Afghanistammit

What the hell is going on here? Amid the (well-deserved) attention being paid to the political future of Iraq, Afghanistan has busied itself with creating a thoroughly theocratic constitution. While nominally democratic, what good does that do anyone when religious (and given that the religion in question is Islam, sexual) discrimination is built right into the country’s founding document? My hope is that U.S. involvement in the country, even if it’s just in Kabul and wherever else the troops happen to be at the time, will prevent the kind of egregious abuse this has the potential for fomenting, but clearly it would be best to head this off at the (Khyber) pass. Actually, that’s putting it mildly: It would be an affront to the Afghans and Americans who’ve sacrificed so much blood and treasure to topple the Taliban and oust their murdering cohorts in al Qaeda to do anything but prevent the return of theocratic intolerance.

It seems as though we’ve learned, at long last, that it’s pointless to replace one autocrat with another. When will we learn that it’s equally pointless to replace dictatorship with theocracy, particularly when, as is the case throughout the Muslim world, the relationship between the two is symbiotic?

Listen, all I want in this world is someone who’s left of Bush on social issues and right of Bush on the war.

(Link courtesy of Josh Cohen.)