[Kabul, November 4. Image via Getty]

Afghan children stand by a wall with a poster of newly re-elected President Hamid Karzai as they watch Karzai supporters dance in celebration in the streets of Kabul on November 4, 2009. The main challenger in Afghanistan's troubled fraud-hit presidential election, Abdullah Abdullah, said Karzai's re-election 'has no legal basis'. AFP PHOTO/ Nicolas ASFOURI (Photo credit should read NICOLAS ASFOURI/AFP/Getty Images)

[Maimai, Afghanistan; November 1. Image via Getty]

MAIMAI, AFGHANISTAN - NOVEMBER 1: An Afghan girl looks out from the window of a helicopter on November 1, 2009 in the remote village of Maimai in Badakshan province. Abdullah Abdullah has formally withdrawn from the run-off election only six days ahead of the vote. The top challenger to President Karzai demanded the removal of several election officials alleged to have been involved in voting fraud during the August 20 presidential election. President Hamid Karzai rejected his request as talks broke down yesterday. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

[Kaihan Valley, Afghanistan; July 31. Image via Getty]

An elderly Afghan woman attends a campaign event for the August presidential elections at a rally launched for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, one of 41 presidential candidates, in Kaihan valley in central Afghanistan on July 31, 2009. Karzai is due to visit the valley on August 1. Afghans go to the polls on August 20 to elect a president for the second time in the history of their turbulent country. AFP PHOTO/SHAH Marai (Photo credit should read SHAH MARAI/AFP/Getty Images)

[Petab-e Shinia, Afghanistan; July 30. Image via Getty]

Afghan women attend a campaign event for President Hamid Karzai, one of 41 presidential candidates, in Petab-e Shinia village of Behsud district in Wardak province on July 30, 2009. Afghanistan's people will go to the polls to elect the next president on August 20 in the second election after the 2001 defeat of the Taliban. AFP PHOTO/Massoud HOSSAINI (Photo credit should read MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/Getty Images)

But, in case you're not caught up, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was caught trying to push through a law that, among other things, designated how often Shia women were required under law to submit sexually to their husbands. Fits were thrown, reviews were promised and, according to Registan's Joshua Foust, Karzai's government is now swearing it's not going through.

"Definitely not," Ambassador Said Jawad said in an interview on Bloomberg Television's "Political Capital with Al Hunt," scheduled to air today. "This is not the law yet, and it will not become the law, because it contradicts some important principles of the Afghan constitution."

Well, if it contradicts the constitution now, it probably did so before everyone took notice, too. That does not, however, mean that the law doesn't continue to have its supporters.

Of course, Mohammad Asif Mohseni, the law's primary architect, disagrees, and wants us all to butt out of it.

"The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights," Mohseni told reporters in the capital, Kabul…

Mohseni argued that women and men are very far from equal in today's Afghanistan and should not be treated as such. He pointed out that many rural women are illiterate and would not be able to find work if they were asked to provide some of the family's financial support. Men are typically the breadwinners in Afghan households, expected to provide for their wives and children.

"It is not possible for all women to pay the same amount of money as men are paying. For all these expenses, can't we at least give the right to a husband to demand sex from his wife after four nights?" he said.

Yes, since women are prevented from education and working — by the law Mohseni wants, in fact — they should give it up as recompense for their living expenses.

Foust additionally points out that the law, which was sold as a way to protect Shia minority rights in Afghanistan, has become a way to protect the rights of the Shia minority to do what it wants to half its population without interference from the central government — as if there's much of that, as Anand Gopal points out.

What do Afghan women think about this law?

Most Afghan women have never heard of it. This is because the majority of Afghans are rural, living without electricity or a connection to the happenings in Kabul. Afghan women suffer from the lowest literacy rate in the world, at 13 percent. And the ones that are familiar with it mostly shrug their shoulders, because the conditions that the law imposes are no different than those that already exist in their everyday lives. The typical woman from the country's south or east, for example, cannot leave her home without a male guardian. She must wear the burqa in public at all times, and in some villages she must even don one in private. Marital rape is the norm in a society where sex is a man's right, not a woman's.

According to the UK-based NGO Womankind, anywhere between sixty and eighty percent of marriages are forced, 57 percent of brides are under the age of 16, and 87 percent complain of domestic violence. UNIFEM says that 65 percent of widows in Kabul see suicide as their only option to "get rid of their miseries and desolation." Thousands of women turn to self-immolation every year. There are no reliable stats on rape, as most women will never report it. This is because women can be convicted of zina, extramarital sex, if knowledge of the rape becomes public. In most of the country, even a woman just found outside of her home without the permission of her male guardian will be thrown in jail and tried as an adulterer.

And in case you're thinking that women have it better off in a post-Taliban world, he invites you to think again.

How do Afghan women fare now compared to the Taliban era?

The answer, like most things in Afghanistan, depends on where you look and whom you ask. In the central highlands, for example, women of the ethnic minority group the Hazaras are usually allowed to leave the home and sometimes even find work. In Kabul, some females now have access to education, and there are well-paying NGO jobs available for the elite. Only five percent of girls go to secondary school throughout the country, but in Kabul more girls are enrolled than at any point in the last ten years.

In the south and east, life for women is mostly unchanged since the Taliban times: they remain cloistered indoors, in burqas, away from schools, without health care, without independence, and without protection from physical and sexual violence. And in some ways, life is even worse than during the Taliban: these women now live in an active war zone, caught in a crossfire between belligerents.

The Hazaras, by the way, are part of the Shia minority and — as Foust mentioned — this law is actually aimed at the relatively liberal Hazaras, who are already a put-upon minority subject to extra-legal abuse and defamation. In effect, the law is actually intended to minimize the role of women in a minority population that is already suffering. Great.

But back to Gopal, who points out that Western hands are far from clean when it comes to the status of women in particularly rural Afghanistan.

The US and its allies supported the mujahedeen — fundamentalist, misogynist warlords — against the Soviets in the eighties. The mujahedeen transformed an extremely reactionary interpretation of Islam into the national standard, and in many ways were even worse than the Taliban. They burned down schools and libraries, killed women in public positions, enforced the burqa in areas under their control. They raped and killed thousands. After coming to power in the mid-nineties, they established a Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. One issued decree mandated that:

Women do not need to leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case they are to cover themselves completely; are not to wear attractive clothing and decorative accessories; do not wear perfume; their jewelry must not make any noise; they are not to walk gracefully or with pride and in the middle of the sidewalk; are not to talk to strangers; are not to speak loudly or laugh in public; and they must always ask their husbands' permission to leave home.

When the Taliban arrived in Kabul in 1996, they continued to enforce these mandates, without resorting to the widespread raping and killing that marked the mujahedeen government.

After the Taliban was toppled, the US and rest of the international community supported these same mujahedeen in their return to power. The majority of the Afghan parliament today consists of these warlords. Is it any surprise then that parliament tries to pass anti-women laws?

As I said earlier — it's the guys our government has been supporting that have pushed these laws, and we have no intention of ending our support for them. So the recission of one law, more or less, is a great symbolic gesture, but it doesn't change the reality of life for many women in Afghanistan — and unless we put Hillary Clinton's words about women's rights being fundamental to our national security policy into effect, nothing probably will.

Rape Law? What Rape Law? [Registan]
What You Should Know About Women's Rights in Afghanistan [Huffington Post]

Earlier: U.S.-Backed Afghan Government Passes Pro-Rape Law To Win Election
Afghanistan To Review Its Pro-Rape Law
Hillary Clinton Talked The (Girl) Talk At Senate Confirmation

President Hamid Karzai has agreed to review the recently passed law, undoubtedly due to international outrage over the lack of protection for Afghani women and their rights. "I phoned the president immediately about this because anybody who looks at Afghanistan will be worried if we are going to see laws brought in that discriminate against women and put women at risk," said Prime Minister Brown, "I made it absolutely clear to the president that we could not tolerate that situation. You cannot have British troops fighting, and in some cases dying, to save a democracy where that democracy is infringing human rights. [Karzai] responded by saying this law would not be enacted in the way it has been presented."

Karzai claims that the law, which denies women the right to refuse sex with their husbands (essentially legalizing marital rape) and requires that they ask permission before leaving the house, was "misinterpreted" and, according to Jon Boone of The Guardian, "he promised to send it to the Ministry of Justice for review and amendment if it was found to conflict with the equal rights provisions in Afghanistan's constitution."

Karzai Bows To International Calls To Scrap Afghan "Rape Law" [Guardian]

Earlier: U.S.-Backed Afghan Government Passes Pro-Rape Law To Win Election

MOE: Yo I am here, barely, at an airport hotel that is not actually an airport hotel, more an airport adjacent hotel located nearby a Westfield Mall, but this is where the JetBlue flyer with the friendly Nationwide Hospitality Inc. operator got me the $69 rate, and my god, I am tired, maybe because here it is five in the morning, but news that New Jersey school officials want to ban Red Bull just reminded me I am no longer in school and therefore should probably go locate myself something containing Guarana.

MEGAN: Doing Crappy Hour from the West Coast sucks balls in a way that no one who hasn't done it can ever understand. But that might be because I consider 5 am a time to strive to stay up until, not an hour to get up at.
MEGAN: If it helps, check out the long cool drink of water in this picture and rejoice that somewhere in the bowels of CNN.com, there is a Jezebel looking out for us.
MOE: Yeah I actually forgot to reset my alarm and so woke up around 3:45, but holy SHIT that picture is ridiculous. The gun is um scary though. Also, Obama's hip is hurting? Isn't that a body part whose inflammation we'd usually associate with John McCain…or his mom? Unless…

MEGAN: Um, I'll just say that sometimes after sex my hips hurt, but I have an old ballet injury to explain that, but if that's why Obama's hurts, well, go Michelle!
MEGAN: In other flotsam, by the way, SF mayor Gavin Newsom got straight-married this weekend... in Montana.
MOE: Yeah I bet the wedding I was at was better. Um before I forget can I just say I am fucking sick of shit like "Caroline Kennedy for VP???!!?" which is the only thing worse than "Chuck Hagel for VP????!!!?" which is to say, "WHY AM I READING THIS GO ON VACATION!!!!??!!!"
MEGAN: Everyone for VP!!!

MEGAN: I mean, McCain's got to pick someone before the Olympics start because no one will be paying attention otherwise, or so goes the meme, but I'll bet Obama's VP will interrupt Olympic coverage.
MOE: And then there's this story. I guess I'll listen to it, because really what better things do we have to do? Discuss the half trillion dollar budget deficit planned for 2009 — that's a record, by the way — or how the Frannie Freddie bailout is supposedly the largest government bailout since the New Deal?? Yeah, didn't think so. Although who knows, it's still early, I could see us getting into that shit.
MEGAN: We could talk about the protests at the Vatican to lift the ban on birth control, too.
MOE: Oh how serendipitous I was thinking of lifting my personal ban on that in response to public sentiment as well. I wonder if someone told the Vatican about me and they were like "oh jesus christ we do not want to be responsible for that person procreating." Seriously though, I don't know if this is going to have much of an impact in the Benedict administration.

MEGAN: I'm going to say... exactly none. The Pope listens to God, not the people of the world OR the AIDS rate in Africa. That's God's plan, or do Catholics not believe in predestination? It's so hard to remember CCD.
MOE: In other news does another fifty pointless deaths indicate violence returned to The Iraq? Petraeus seems to think maybe . Oh, and is Afghanistan a narco-state …I kind of want to actually read that one, because I found myself realizing the other day that I really did not know how Colombia had come to control 90% of the cocaine trade exactly and whether there are other countries with power vacuums and the climate and topographical conditions to get in on that, since heroin is, like, probably not as big a moneymaker.
MEGAN: Hahahaha, "returned" to Iraq. You're such a comic genius. Or else Petraeus is.

MOE: Hey I am going to miss how you actually get it when I am being sarcastic.

MEGAN: Although my dad got up and made me coffee this morning, I have yet to get a chance to get up and drink it because in your honor I read Maureen Dowd. That was painful.
MEGAN: But probably not quite as painful as Barack having to submit to an interview in Paris from La Dowd.

MOE: oh GOD.
MOE: I'm not bothering to blockquote this because there's no way anyone would confuse it for anything I would write and even if you charged me with parodying Dowd I could never come up with Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture from Sylvester Stallone to Gloria Gaynor, it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush.

MEGAN: Or how about this awfulness: Obama kept his cool through a week where he was treated as a cross between the Dalai Lama and Johnny Depp. I mean, in my mind, she says this in a little girl voice even more highly pitched than my own.
MEGAN: OK, also, now I have to ask what the fuck?
MOE: Okay this Afghanistan story is really fucking interesting. Basically, post-September 11 Afghanistan is the one kind of situation where this drug war we've been fighting for the past 20 years really comes in handy, as we learned previously from the story of that narcotics guy who successfully interrogated KSM. But the Pentagon, by some combination of generalized Bush Administration wrongheadedness, generalized Bush Administration ineptitude, generalized turf protection and listening to Hamid Karzai, not only systematically undermined the DEA's mission in the country and everyone involved with the drug war, but the whole idea that heroin was bad at all, which in turn just led to the continued flow of this massive spigot of funding to the Taliban and sundry other evildoers.

MEGAN: Wait, Karzai is pro-heroin? Or just anti doing terribly much about it? Anyway, didn't you know that Mary Jane is the Great Satan of our time? Or is it oxycodone? Or meth? Or can we just ask what it is about modern life that so many people feel the need to alter their consciousness to escape it? Because I know what it is about my life, but I'd sort of be interested to know if I'm unique in that.
MOE:

A lot of intelligence — much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here — indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described “jihad against corruption,” told me and other American officials that he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt — some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai — also a Pashtun — had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people.

MEGAN: Is there some reason it matters that they're both Pashtun? Also, in an barely-stable government, I can sort of see the reason if he thinks that the narco-corruption isn't one of the destabilizing forces.
MOE: Well the news here is that no only has opium production grown — a UN report says 80% of poppies in the south were planted in the last two years — it is funding the insurgency and making farmers rich and Afghan officials all the way up to Karzai continue to say things like "it's tradition and poverty makes them do it and we don't want you to dust our crops aerially with pesticides because our poor farmers will think it is poison coming from the sky" when such things are demonstrably not true.
MEGAN: Crop dusting didn't really make us — or the Colombian government — a ton of friends when we did it there either but we didn't exactly stop doing it.
MOE: Well we haven't apparently started doing it in Afghanistan. The point is twofold, though. It's not so much that, according to this guy, how do you keep Afghanistan from becoming the Colombia of opiates, but whether you can use what you learned in Colombia to cut off the flow of funds to the insurgency, I think, I am not through yet though. I mean, I guess eventually, as in Colombia, everyone is in the business, on both sides, and then everything is just …really violent until someone like Uribe comes in and decides to grant wholescale amnesty to pretty much anyone who asks.

MOE:

Karzai was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.

MEGAN: Awww, he's like a mini GWB, just with drugs instead of oil!
MOE: Hahaha the chief of the anticorruption commission is a convicted heroin dealer.
MOE: And here's our little microcosm of the whole damn thing:

At the same time, the 101st Airborne arrived in eastern Afghanistan. Its commanders promptly informed Ambassador Wood that they would only permit crop eradication if the State Department paid large cash stipends to the farmers for the value of their opium crop. Payment for eradication, however, is disastrous counternarcotics policy: If you pay cash for poppies, farmers keep the cash and grow poppies again next year for more cash. And farmers who grow less-lucrative crops start growing poppies so that they can get the money, too. Drug experts call this type of offer a “perverse incentive,” and it has never worked anywhere in the world.

Sort of like the drug war has never worked anywhere in the world?

MEGAN:

KarzaiBush was playing us like a fiddle: the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Talibanin Iraq; Karzai’sBush's friends could get rich off the drugoil trade; he could blame the Westliberals for hisour problems; and in 20092004 he would be elected to a new term.

MOE: Or Bush could blame the Middle East for his problems?
MEGAN: Hell, that shit doesn't even work in U.S. farm policy. You pay subsidies for wheat, they grow more wheat. You pay subsidies to let marginal lands grow wild, people plant on marginal lands for a year or two to collect the subsidies.
MOE: It would be a more direct counterpart.
MOE: Okay here is something depressing (or heartening?) Check the fucking comments. Some of the stuff that has been "recommended" is basically illiterate.

MOE: Such as

2008 8:35 am
After I saw American Gangster, I knew that the increase in heroin production was no accident. I'm sure the DEA is involved in shipping the drugs back to American cities. It's no wonder we can't see the coffins unloaded at Andrews Airforce Base.
— Jane, Royal Oak, MI
Recommended by 7 Readers

MEGAN: You know, there's a growing debate about whether to allow comments on newspapers' websites for exactly that reason. Like, I know Gawker employs a person (hey, Kaila! your hair is probably lovely today!) whose job it is to weed out the crazies and I've looked in the bin and WHOO boy are there some crazy people out there who write some crazy ass shit. But I guess because newspapers have higher comment volumes, or higher crazy volumes or haven't been able to figure out how to monetize their websites, they can't manage that shit?
MOE: Incidentally that other drug is in the news today too.

MEGAN: OH, speaking of drug wars, I've seen so many freaking meth heads back here. Upstate NY was slow to come to the metholution because of the easy access to good Canadian weed, but I do believe we've finally made it into the 21st century!
MOE: Yesterday I found this old story on Gabriel Garcia Marquez advocating "outlaw American chemists" develop a kind of synthetic cocaine to rival the real deal as a way to combat his own country's addiction to easy money. But um I sort of feel like, that's how we got meth, and meth did not do much good for Colombia.
MEGAN: Or Afghanistan! Meth is for people that can't afford crack, let alone coke, or heroin shipping in for Afghanistan, and who don't mind the side effects like the black teeth and the faster progression to heroin chic and the complete wasted crazy look that horrifies me in a bar to the point where my friend has to remind me to stop staring at the meth head.

In the global economy of the moment, the United States itself is too big to fail.

The logic for that assurance goes like this:

The American consumer has for decades served as the engine of world commerce, using borrowed cash to snap up the accoutrements of modern living — clothes and computers and cars now manufactured, in whole or in part, in factories from Asia to Latin America. Eliminate the American wherewithal to shop, and the pain would ripple out to multiple shores.

Globalization, in other words, allowed China and Japan to amass the fortunes they have been lending to the United States.

But globalization also emboldened American capitalists to take huge risks they might have otherwise avoided — like borrowing to erect forests of unsold homes from California to Florida, delivering the speculative disaster of the day. They were operating with bedrock confidence that money would never run out. Someone would always buy American debt, delivering more cash for the next go.

And this same interconnectedness appears to have reassured regulators in Washington about the health of the American financial system, as they declined to intervene against highly speculative lending during the real estate boom. Mortgages were being distributed to investors around the globe, and so were the risks, the regulators reasoned. Anyone who bought into that risk would have a strong interest in seeing that the American financial system stayed upright.

In other words, in the estimation of people in control of money, the United States cannot be allowed to collapse, just as Fannie and Freddie cannot be allowed to fail. Too much is riding on their survival.

MOE: Yo whassup.
MEGAN: Yo
It's finally no longer insanely humid here for about 5 more minutes
MOE: Did it rain last night? Apparently there was
some sort of hurricane during my panel last night.
MEGAN: Yes, I was going to dinner and I looked in my
closet and was like, hey! There are those white linen pants I love and
haven't worn! So naturally it poured rain.
MOE: Yo, this is probably a Crappy Hour first but I'd
like to discuss this disgraced gambling addicted ref... I used to be really into basketball and
the 2002 Western Conference Finals between the Sacramento Kings and
the Lakers was...probably the most exciting ten days of pro basketball
at least since Jordan retired, and then fucking Game Six comes along,
and Kobe elbows Mike Bibby and Bibby gets a fucking serious bloody
nose, and THEY CALL FOUL ON BIBBY.
MEGAN: Um, I believe you have now officially lost me?
MOE: Okay, well you see there was this crooked ref in the NBA...
MEGAN: Wait, ok, so, like a guy that is being kicked
out is the one that made that call to extend the game? That sucks.
So, everyone cheats in sports. What the fuck?
MOE: No no no, I guess now that he's been disgraced
he's filing suit against the NBA alleging that games are fixed by
referees to suit the interests of PROFIT.

Tim knew referees A and F to be "company men," always
acting in the interest of the NBA, and that night, it was in the NBA's
interest to add another game to the series. Referees A and F heavily
favored Team 6. Personal fouls [resulting in obviously injured
players] were ignored even when they occurred in full view of the
referees. Conversely, the referees called made-up fouls on Team 5 in
order to give additional free throw opportunities for Team 6. Their
foul-calling also led to the ejection of two Team 5 players. The
referees' favoring of Team 6 led to that team's victory that night,
and Team 6 came back from behind to win that series."

it's like the baseball
strike(s).. that fucked MLB up reallllll goooood. And it took
McGuire/Sosa home-run race to bring something back to the game (insert
steriod aside here)

Asked about
corruption allegations dogging Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, Mr
Bush insisted: "I have found him to be an honest man."

He also offered words of encouragement for another ally, Gordon Brown,
whom he will meet on Sunday. He said that he needed no advice on
coping with political adversity. He is "plenty confident and plenty
smart, plenty capable — he can sort it out".

Moran also addressed the issue of sexism which,
during the course of the campaign played the role of the gopher chased
by Bill Murray in "Caddyshack" — popping up and down, up and down, as
the weeks and months went by.

His style was this: After first
complimenting the beautiful eyes of a Spanish reporter, Chávez curled
his lips, frowned and scornfully declared that the Interpol news
conference, "this show organized by these clowns," did "not deserve a
single serious comment." Then he commented ad infinitum in an
hour-long counterattack.
There was guilt by association and character assassination. He called
Noble, a former U.S. law enforcement official, "disgusting,"
"immoral," "corrupt," "irresponsible," "shameful" and "Dick Tracy, the
super-cop," and a "gringo cop" at that.
There were theater and faux magic. He used a mock card trick (he said
he learned it from Castro) to help dramatize how he thought the
incriminating data had wound up on the computers. He scribbled a note,
stepped into the audience and showed it to a reporter. Then he walked
over and planted it on one of his ministers sitting in the front row
— just as he believed the files would have been planted on the
computers.