After the 9/11 attack, the United States government began openly and privately courting Pakistan for obvious strategic reasons. Accordingto an MSNBC report,
AfghanistanÂ’s neighbor, Pakistan, also has incentives to cooperate. For siding with the U.S. against the Taliban and bin Laden, Islamabad stands to get as much as $3 billion in debt relief, emergency aid for refugees and the removal of sanctions that were imposed when they tested nuclear weapons and staged a military coup. That would enable Pakistan to also get military aid, including spare parts for its F-16Â’s, Tow missiles and armed personnel carriers.
NBCÂ’s Mitchell reports that Saudi Arabia has also offered Pakistan free oil.
Before we climb into bed with Pakistan, however, lets remember that Pakistan shares many of the features that President George W. Bush so eloquently noted plague Afghanistan.
For example, a little over a month ago a Pakastani court sentenced Dr. Younis Shaikh to death for blasphemy. What did Shaikh say that was so horrific?
Shaik allegedly said that since the Prophet Mohammed didn’t receive his first spiritual revelation until he was 40, Shaikh argued that Mohammed wasn’t a Muslim during his younger years, and that moreover Mohammed’s parents weren’t Muslim since they died before he revealed his spiritual revelations.
As Human Rights Watch notes, a Pakistani Chrisitian, Ayub Masih, was sentenced to death for blasphemy as well. His crime? He spoke favorably of Salman Rushdie.
Unfortunately, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Two years after General Zia-ul-Haq took power in Pakistan in 1977, Pakistan’s criminal code was modified with what are called the Hudood Ordinances. These encapsulate some of the anti-female attitudes that are so derided in Afghanistan.
In Pakistan, extra-marital sex is illegal and the age of majority for women is 16 or the onset of puberty, whichever comes first. In practice what this means is that if a 30-year-old man has sex with a 12-year-old girl, rather than prosecute that as statutory rape, Pakistani authorities will in fact go after the 12-year-old girl as well.
And unbelievably the girl cannot even testify in her own defense at such a trial. As a 1999 State Department report on Pakistan noted,
Likewise, the testimony of women, Muslim or non-Muslim, is not admissible in cases involving Hadd punishments. Thus, if a Muslim man rapes a Muslim woman in the presence of several women, he cannot be convicted under the Hudood ordinances because women cannot testify. Similarly, if a Muslim man rapes a woman in the presence of non-Muslim men and women, he cannot be convicted because women and non-Muslim men cannot testify.
And these folks are going to be our new allies?