Iran and Afghanistan: Contrasts in Securing Power

In Iran, Ahmadinejad is apparently set to nominate three women to the Iranian cabinet. The AP reports that these nominations appear "to be an attempt by Ahmadinejad to win the support of Iranian women as he fends off opposition claims that his re-election to the presidency in June was fraudulent." These would be the first female ministers Iran has had since the 1970's.

Iran, then, provides an example of a leader making concessions to vocal groups in order to safeguard his power. Women were a vocal and visible part of the uprising in Iran, and so Ahmadinejad is throwing them a bone by including women in his cabinet.

I contrast this with Afghanistan, where, as discussed in the previous post, Karzai is capitulating to fundamentalist voices by quietly passing a law that allows husbands to withhold food from wives who refuse to have sex with them, among other things. Rather than kill a law that would legalize marital rape, which caused international outcry in March, Karzai mollified outsiders and then passed the current law, which undermines women's rights to a similar degree.

The question I have is: why? Why does the regime in Afghanistan, which Americans put in place and have supported for 8 years, still need to placate warlords by stripping women of their rights? Why can Iran, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, tolerate more legal protection for women than Afghanistan? Why did the US even throw the Taliban regime out of Afghanistan if the US-supported regime would be similarly offensive to international standards of human rights?

WTF is THIS?!?!?

Remember in April when there was international outcry about a law that legalized marital rape in Afghanistan? Remember how the president we support, Hamid Karzai, promised to fix it? Well, in Karzai's world I guess "fix it" means "implement it" because looky here. From the article:

The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying "blood money" to a girl who was injured when he raped her.

With this law, Karzai is doing what other power hungry leaders in the region have done for years: sold out progressive principles, even when those are enshrined in the country's constitution, in order to cement their influence over local clerics and warlords. Afghanistan's constitution of 2004 promotes women's rights. You can read a nice breakdown of the constitution by Prof. Madhavi Sunder here.

Democracy cannot exist without the rule of law and the participation of a meaningful percentage of a country's population. The rule of law means that, to some extent, duress and fraud are not the primary means of making someone do something; that, to some extent, people abide by the laws the government sets out for them. People are more likely to do that when the laws are legitimate, according to the allocation of rights set up in that country's constitution. Constitutions are like compacts: the government lists the rights it has over the people and the people's representatives list the rights that the people reserve for themselves.

In Afghanistan, the rights of the people included rights for female people. When it made its constitution, Afghanistan elected to allow the International Human Rights Commission to enforce the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW prohibits sex discrimination in both public and private realms. So, a law that allows a husband to withhold basic necessities like food from his wife if she won't have sex with him clearly enshrines sex discrimination into the laws of Afghanistan, which is unconstitutional. Patently unconstitutional laws like this undermine the rule of law profoundly.

Secondly, democracies in their modern form require a meaningful percentage of the population to participate. It's true that in Athens, a democracy could include only upper class men, but I'd like to think that we have a different view of human beings' worth than they did in ancient times. How can you have a functioning democracy when the government allows half the country's population to be abused? Women in Afghanistan can vote, but they can't leave the house without their husbands' permission according to this new law. That is an unsustainable faux-democracy, inspired by the desire to capitulate to fundamentalists and warlords. WTF is this?!?!?!