In Kabul, Afghanistan, women are being newly incarcerated in their marriages even as the USA tries to free the country.
About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.Why are women and children the first casualties in any war?
It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning. With the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women walked two miles to Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law's repeal.
"Whenever a man wants sex, we cannot refuse," said Fatima Husseini, 26, one of the marchers. "It means a woman is a kind of property, to be used by the man in any way that he wants."
Are men so weak and fearful that the only way they can fight feminine power is by coercion, threats, violence and lawful emotional intimidation?
When the sovereign governance of any nation state turns its Panopticonic eye to persecute only a narrow segment of its citizenry -- while also demanding loyalty and allegiance from the persecuted -- signifies the beginning of the end as disaster, disharmony and dishonor become the dying cries of the state in ashes.
I have to wonder what can be done about the illiteracy problem - we learned in our own great nation that literacy helped set many people free.
That's a good point, Gordon. We should, perhaps, be providing teachers instead of bullets to win the final stages of the war.