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?