Friday, March 24, 2006

What Are We Fighting For?

Remember when we went into Afghanistan after 9/11? While the main motivation was to strike back at the closest thing to a nation that was behind the attacks (and to track down bin Laden - marvel at our lack of success on that note), a secondary benefit of our invasion was to boot out the Taliban and move the country towards something vaguely resembling the 20th century. Well, it looks like it's not taking. Our first experiment with democracy in the Islamic world has created a nation where a Christian man may soon be executed because he has rejected Islam. While the Bush administration hems and haws about what could be done in this situation, the local religious leaders are not standing still:

'Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This
man must die,' said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was
jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hard-line regime was
ousted in 2001.
Holy shit - if he's a moderate, what must the extremists be thinking?

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