Wednesday, August 19, 2009

What Our Soldiers Are Dying For

Iain Dale's Diary: Is This What Our Soldiers Are Dying For?

I just read on Andrew Nutt's blog the following about a new law which has come into force in Afghanistan...

A new law was recently passed that an Afghan husband is allowed to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex with him. A woman must have also her husband’s permission to work. An earlier bill asked Shia women to have sex with their husbands every four days at a minimum. It also removed the need for consent to sex within marriage, effectively condoning rape. This amended version has been published in the official gazette and become law.


Surely this can't be true, I thought. Is this what our armed forces are fighting for? But yes, it is true. HERE's the report from MSNBC.

And there was me thinking we were there to bring freedom and democracy to the people of Aghanistan. How naive."


Our soldiers (my nephew Nick is in the Royal Marines) are fighting so that we can control a cauldron of extremism in the far-middle east.

Most of the people there (male and female) are not in any essential way reachable by any military or diplomatic methods.

The terrorism is fueled by by our dependence on oil, and the power that gives religious elites, both Shia and Sunni, and if not them, thugs like Saddam. We rightly support Israel's right to exist, but its position as a western cipher in the region makes everything else worse.

We need to keep the military lid on the region; decrease our need for oil from the region; and de-toxify the presence of Israel (which is now home to many religious extremists just as gross as the Taliban).

What else can we do?

I mean, seriously this is not even a party issue in the UK.

1 comment:

Quietzapple said...

Of course all this sounds, and in practice much of it is revolting.

I hope it brings more women out to vote tomorrow, in opposition to their subjugations.

A friend, now dead, who was an unorthodox Orthodox Jew told me of a few aspects of the practices of his religion as we drove to bridge competitions, often when he should not have been traveling by the lights of orthodoxy.

As I understood it these included the requirement that couples engage in sex on saturday nights, invariably. That women were to be so shamed by divorce that they became still more powerless chattels.

Traditional versions of religions have not all moved as far as the C of E towards what seems to me to be a Christ friendly liberalism.

It should not be a surprise that the outgoing Government of Afghanistan seeks the support of those whom it expects to vote: males who have traditional views.

Sad, but true.

That is politics, and traditional religion I fear.