Afghan law, Canadian outrage

The Canadians are seeing it and saying it: ‘we’re dying for this?!’

“How can the government say our soldiers have died to protect the rights of women when Hamid Karzai passes this law?” NDP Leader Jack Layton asked in the Commons.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in an interview with the CBC from the G20 summit in London, called the move “antithetical” to Canada’s mission in Afghanistan.

“The concept that women are full human beings with human rights is very, very central to the reason the international community is engaged in this country…” he said. “It’s a significant change we want to see from the bad, old days of the Taliban.”

Canadian government officials said yesterday they still aren’t certain if the law had been fully passed or signed by Mr. Karzai. But Alexandra Gilbert, a women’s-rights project co-ordinator for the Canadian agency Rights and Democracy, said from Kabul she understands through women MPs that the law has been passed and signed.

It is a new family-law code for Afghanistan’s Shia minority, and while it does not apply to all, women’s groups in Afghanistan fear the precedent, Ms. Gilbert said.

… University of Ottawa professor Roland Paris said the new law is so egregious that Western nations had an easy choice to oppose it, but as they scale back emphasis on democracy and support reconciliation with Taliban elements, other hard choices will come.

http://tinyurl.com/afghancan

Painful and hard decisions? Hell no. Its not hard. There’s clear right and wrong here and if this law and others like it gets installed, it will be a travesty, a sheer betrayal of our soldiers, us, and the people whose rights are negotiated away.

If they say this is what the Afghan people want, we leave. Not that simple, I know, especially when the ‘Afghan people’ actually means Afghan men. But if the Afghan people, men and women, want their country to change, it’s time for them to stand up and fight for it. Really step up, protest, surrender no room for such laws. Because if they don’t? How can they seriously expect us to do it for them?

Time and again, we’re seeing it wherever we have a military presence. I know I’m not the only one tired of it all, insulted and enraged on our troops behalf, more than ready to just leave them all to hack it out among themselves.

And this will be the last time I speak of this here. I’m done.