Afghanistan Has Not Been Liberated

Although I agree with the official policy, that U.S. soldiers shouldn’t be proselytizing, didn’t they “liberate” Afghanistan?

U.S. Central Command’s General Order Number 1 forbids troops on active duty — including all those based in Iraq and Afghanistan — from trying to convert people to another religion. Trying to convert Muslims to another faith is a crime in Afghanistan. [Yahoo!]

In light of this fact alone, I would say “no, Afghanistan has not been liberated.” But the U.S. military has far more important things to worry about than whether one rogue soldier plans on distributing Pashtun-translations of the Bible to Afghani people.

For example, dozens — perhaps a hundred Afghan civilians are dead as a result of a bombing raid carried out by the U.S. on Monday night, this is not the first one of its kind. That said, pretending to have the Afghani citizens’ interests at heart while discussing Bible-Study is just a little bit disingenuous. But I digress: back to the topic of “liberation”.

It’s clearly not just “proselytizing” that’s at issue here:

An Afghan man who converted to Christianity was sentenced to death for apostasy in 2006 but was allowed to leave the country after an international uproar. [Y!]

Although the condition of the Afghani people may have generally tended to improve in recent years, they’re still well on the wrong side of the line between liberty and tyranny. That they’ve overthrown and replaced one violent band of criminals who would, e.g., stone to death the victims of gang-rape, or kill you for professing another faith, etc., with another violent band of criminals who promises not to execute rape-victims, but will still execute you for the onerous crime of “not being Muslim”, can barely be interpreted as a step in the right direction; after all, it was  religious fanaticism and intolerance which enabled the previous abomination.

I could almost overlook a law which merely aimed to keep missionaries (e.g.) from going door to door to spread their faith. But to punish a man at all for converting to another creed, which may occur with or without an instigating proselytizer, let alone sentencing that man to death, is about a million miles from reasonable, and any government which carries out, enables, encourages, or apologizes for these measures is worthy of nothing but scorn and derision.

Talk about “survivor-bias,” it’s not freedom, and it’s not a fucking “democracy” if you kill off everyone with an opposing viewpoint.