After the 9/11 terrorist attack, the United States government began openly and privately courting Pakistan for obvious strategic reasons. According to an MSNBC report,
Afghanistan’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-16’s, Tow missiles and armed personnel carriers.
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, especially in the way its legal system treats women.
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. There are a couple dozen girls 12 and up in Pakistani prisons due to precisely such charges.
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?
Sources:
U.S. Department of State Report on International Religious Freedom for 1999: Pakistan. Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Washington DC, September 9, 1999.