More than alms to beg for: An Afghan woman begs along a busy Kabul street in February 2009. As Barack Obama escalates American involvement in Afghanistan, human rights and civil rights there collapse, begging the question: what are western soldiers dying for? (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
Propaganda has its noble moments. In World War II, Hollywood was happy to prove it, softening up soldiers with movies like "Casablanca" so they'd be willing to leave their girlfriends to kill Nazis ("where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of"), and toughening them up with movies like "Sahara" so they'd get a whiff of the heroics they could tell their girlfriends about when they came back. Along the way, Humphrey Bogart defeated fascism and Hollywood produced a few classics still worth watching in a 21st century rich in sleepless nights.
Bogart would have a harder time priming soldiers for killing Islamists these days. It's not that the heroic narrative of Americans saving Iraqis or Afghans from themselves would be unconvincing in light of the state-sponsored horror shows of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons and torture as policy. Assume, hopefully, that these things will never happen again, that the fight in the Middle East is being conducted with clean hands. The question remains: What, precisely, are American soldiers still dying for over there -- in Afghanistan especially, where President Barack Obama, borrowing a page from his predecessor's book of follies, ordered close to a doubling of U.S. troops, from 38,000 to 68,000?
Legalizing Spousal Rape
The question is especially pertinent in light of the latest scandal of what passes for Afghan “customs” western soldiers are being called on to defend: a new law, rushed through the Afghan parliament by Afghan President Hamid Karzai in an attempt to appease religious fundamentalists, that takes women’s rights for the country’s Shiite monority back to the stone age.
“In a massive blow for women's rights,” London’s Independent reported, “the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the home, according to UN papers seen by The Independent. […] The law regulates personal matters like marriage, divorce, inheritance and sexual relations among Afghanistan's minority Shia community.” It’s not the first, but the latest, such instance of a nation conceding in law what the Taliban no longer needs to impose by force. The list is long and disheartening.
Read the full article, "Blaspheming Human Rights: Why Afghanistan Is the Wrong War."
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