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Proposed speech by a POTUS to be delivered in Afghanistan to the Afghan parliament.

Today I have been told that one of your citizens is to be killed, by your government, because he chose to change his religion. I have also been told that at least one of your judges has declared this man insane, because he chooses to change his religion.

In the United States we have people who represent every major religion in the world and most of the minor ones as well. We cannot decree that they must be a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew, or hold any other faith and we cannot decree that they cannot be a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or anything else. They must chose or not. It is a choice between them and God, as only they find themself so led to that choice by God and only God.

It is also, a fact, that in the Quran, just as in the tenets of Christianity or Judaism, that a person's religious belief cannot be compelled; it must be chosen or it is not a faith that the person has accepted. Compulsion is no more than following a secular legal command carried out by a government and not a personal adoption of faith by either reason, persuasion or any true belief on the part of the individual.

The United States, its citizens and its armed forces, released Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban and gave your nation the opportunity to choose and develop your own government using democratic means, as opposed to force of arms by one faction or another. We did not demand any religious compulsion from us to you in the adoption of the constitution for that government. And the men and women, our men and women, who fought to provide that opportunity for you, represented all the faiths practiced in our nation.

Now, you seek to tell us that a man who choses, freely, to follow a path to God different from a path he previously chose is insane.

In our view, the concept that he does not have the right to chose his faith is the insanity.

Therefore, I came here today to tell you:

I have put all our forces on 24 hour alert, to the possibility that they will, all, every single one of them, leave your nation in a very short time, as short a time as possible.

They will leave if the man you seek to murder for his relgious conversion is in fact murdered by your government.

Not only will our men and women leave, they will take anything and everything of ours with them. Not only will they leave but we will not support any of our coalition partners who might seek to stay without us and we will not continue any form of interchange or support to you after we leave.

Some, most, predict that, upon our departure, the Taliban, the foreign Al Queda fighters and your war lords will again make war amongst themselves and among you and again bring your nation to complete ruin; or at least it will seem. You will have brought it on yourself, and we will not try to prevent it.

Some, most, predict that the future would then see your nation as the launching point for terrorist attacks against us, as it was on September 11, 2001. We agree that there is good likelyhood of that and that in spite of our best efforts, they will, in some manner, at least once, succeed.

We will not be back here again when they do; at least you will not see our forces here as you did when we routed the Taliban.

But, force we will use.

We will wait for the attack to come and when it does we will come back here, from the sky, and we will turn every square inch of your nation, from border to border to border, into one continuous molten rock.

We await your decision.