What kind of Afghanistan

Human Rights Watch reports that Hamid Karzai has made a deal with fundamentalist factions in Afghanistan to pass a law that "gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands...grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers...requires women to get permission from their husbands to work...[and] effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying "blood money" to a girl who was injured when he raped her."

This runs against the Afghan constitution, so one hopes that ultimately Karzai will be overruled, and that this despicable compromise will be overridden. Otherwise, if this is indeed the shape of things to come, one wonders what all the fuss about democracy and modernization was really about. When asked what success looks like in Afghanistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke has nothing better to offer than "We'll know it when we see it." You know, like porno. For shame.