Out of focus

Bush is troubled – troubled he says, about the dire fate of an Afghan convert to Christianity.  Now Bush is rarely troubled and isn’t known to be aware that the rosy picture he paints of the new Afghanistan isn’t exactly the hard edge realism one gets from a photograph.  He tells us that women are liberated, girls are going to school, the Taliban is gone and it’s all about Democracy in action.  That, as well as most of what issues from God’s Own Party, should long since have made us aware that a partial picture is a kind of lie.

Afghanis voted, according to the propaganda we receive, for a constitution that guarantees religious freedom.  The Afghan constitution provides death for those who exercise freedom of belief.  

"I look forward to working with the government of that country to make sure that people are protected in their capacity to worship" says George.  I believe him, but I don’t believe he’ll be playing up the point that if Afghanistan is to be restrained from hacking off the heads of infidels,  change will not result from an internal Democratic process, but from the military might of an occupying power with a secular constitution.  Afghanistan has no separation of religious power from Governmental power and that is something George has to render blurry and out of focus.

Abdul Rahman has been a practicing Christian for 16 years and the new US backed government, basking in the democratic light of freedom wants to kill him for it.  Their government, it seems, takes the same position as the religious right in the US: that law is based on received scripture and so should have the same power.  It’s a prescription for the same old horror the West once had and the East has yet to get rid of.

So when they tell you the Taliban is gone, it’s not the story.  They are still there, just over the border, like part of a cancer that the surgeon didn’t get all of.  Their program was only a bit more tyrannical and draconian than what obtains in “free” Afghanistan. The country is under the heel of malicious mullahs and drug lords and the government is held together by the military power of infidels. The story, just outside the edges of the photograph is very different from what the photographer wants you to see.