Obscene FanatIcism

Afghanistan presents itself as a serial failure. A critically unstable country unable to provide for its own economic well being, and as a society incapable of offering its people the freedom to be normal human beings with normal aspirations toward self-sufficiency and a future for their children.

One of the five most indigent countries of the world, torn generation after generation by conflict, it is a truly desolate place. Along with its endemic poverty, corruption is resolutely entrenched as a tradition and is as much a part of the society as its unforgiving religion.

Despite liberation from the iron rule of the Taliban, women walk about in burqas, revealing nothing of their semblance to the female beings. Governance is disjointed, despite the currently elected government of Hamid Karzai in whose parliament sit the very warlords who had fractured and violated the country after the departure of the Russians, many of whom still govern various provinces as their personal satrapies.

This is a country mired in the historical past, religious and tribal and geographic. Its traditional hierarchical culture is one in which mullahs and tribal chiefs are authoritarian, tyrannical and to be abjectly obeyed. Illiteracy and innumeracy are rampant. Honour killings remain an integral part of tradition. Wives are treated as chattel and girls married by thirteen.

The international community is invested with the notion that it must bring full democracy to Afghanistan, to rescue it from itself, from its past, its traditions, its religious fanaticism. While the fundamental Afghanistan remains mired in the memory of the Islamic caliphate re-born under the Taliban, UN and NATO forces strive doubly to wrest the country irrevocably from the Taliban, and to introduce 21st Century sensibilities to its politics.

While fighting off the Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents - along with all the foreign Islamists eager to fight honourable jihad on behalf of an Islamic country - foreign troops and their diplomats and their NGOs are also heavily engaged in infrastructure building, in setting up schools and health clinics and instructing men and women on their freedoms and rights. Volunteers from abroad come to teach their judiciary, their military and police.

Yet, it must be asked, just how much separates the moderates, like Hamed Karzai, from the fanatics? An Afghan journalism student who mistakenly thought his country had already arrived into the 20th Century asked an unappealing question to his journalism tutor with respect to Islamic tenets concerning women's rights, while in class. He was swiftly yanked back to the 14th Century.

Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, a journalism student, was convicted of blasphemy. Under Sharia law, incorporated into the Afghan constitution, it is illegal to insult Islam by questioning any of its tenets. The punishment for which is death. One might consider it to be a human right to question matters of concern. It is the most elemental of Western freedoms.

International outrage over that case resulted in the young man being re-tried. He has now been sentenced to 20 years in prison, an improvement over death, but in an Afghanistan prison, one might equivocate. It represents a living death. His brother, another journalist, is convinced that influential Islamists compelled the appeals court to impose that penalty, and took President Karzai along with them.

The 24-year-old budding journalist has doubtless been cured of his human-rights curiosity; at least in that particular type of forum. He has now spent a full year in Kabul's dread prison system. If the international community fails to adequately express its outrage over this miscarriage of justice for the sake of appeasing fanatical Islamists, he has another 19 years to go.

He joins another ex-journalist in the country who a month ago was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the unpardonable sin of publishing a translation of the Koran that was held to contain errors.

Errors in judgement; they exist everywhere.