It's obvious that the Afghanistan government will try to wiggle out of their public relations nightmare by declaring the Christian convert from Islam, Abdul Rahman, mentally incompetent to stand trial. That will prove nothing. The lack of religious freedom remains, and the penalty also remains (death). Professor John S. Ford of the UCLA School of medicine inveighs against using psychiatry as a tool of social engineering. (HT: Michelle Malkin)
The fact is that the lack of religious freedom in the "new" Afghanistan was an issue the United States didn't want to address explicitly during the writing of the constitution. Those who pointed out the problematic future of that approach, like Andrew C. McCarthy and Paul Marshall, were pooh-poohed. Now we're living with the short-sightedness (dare we say incompetence?) of our U.S. government. A kind of benign political correctness and naivete concerning the power and potency of religion (including, and especially Islam) bedevils the State department and other areas of "enlightened opinion." This current crisis could have been avoided.
Andrew McCArthy concludes his essay:
You reap what you sow. What is happening in Afghanistan (and in Iraq) is precisely what we bought on to when we actively participated in the drafting of constitutions which — in a manner antithetical to the development of true democracy — ignored the imperative to insulate the civil authority from the religious authority, installed Islam as the state religion, made sharia a dominant force in law, and expressly required that judges be trained in Islamic jurisprudence. To have done all those things makes outrage at today’s natural consequences ring hollow.
We can pull our heads up from the sand now and say, “No, no, no! We’re nice people. We didn’t mean it that way. That’s too uncivilized to contemplate.” But the inescapable truth is: the United States made a calculated decision that it wasn’t worth our while to fight over Islamic law (indeed, we encouraged it as part of the political solution). People who objected (like moi) were told that we just didn’t grasp the cultural dynamic at work. I beg to differ — we understood it only too well.