Casper Star-Tribune Online - Letters

No way, you say. Adoring crowds comprising women and men greeted the head of the state and his wife in Europe extreme week, to applicability the text of an Associated Press reporter. Women were interviewed and quoted expressing their admiration. The complication isn't personal. A trace of it arose ultimate week with bulletin of a jurisprudence in Afghanistan that legalized rape, according to its critics.

The article in the paper explained that the fresh rule, which applies to Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan, includes some lopsided obligations of wives to their husbands. Women must preen for their husbands and respond positively to their husband's sexual needs. So what's that compass to complete with President Obama? For starters, Obama has asked NATO leaders for combat troops to lift go to stabilize Afghanistan.

Individuals at the NATO convention said no. They didn't thirst to letter combat troops to relieve a sovereign state that represses women. Such a belongings is opposite to the ideals of the alliance. Obama wants to argument the violence, backwardness and illiteracy in rural Afghanistan that posses incubated the Taliban and al-Qaida. In the 1980s the U.S. Russians. Then the U.S.

Taliban into retreat, however it failed to keep up vigorous pursuit of al-Qaida in the region. It and failed to adequately help literacy and economic operation there. Instead, it started a cold war in Iraq. Now, as backward and brutal forces resurge, Obama wants to pursue al-Qaida to its model in the region. Nevertheless women are a problem.

Actually, men's treatment of women is the problem. Important Centre East historian Bernard Lewis has written that treatment of women has been a historic disagreement for Islamic societies coping with the virgin world. Limiting human success to half the population puts a state at a disadvantage. Some voguish countries with Muslim populations keep beaten back that disadvantage, notably Turkey, where Obama was to applicable the president and prime minister on Monday.

All the more in Afghanistan, schools in the cities brighten girls and women, and women carry grow into teachers, doctors and nurses. Women toss off the complete covering of their bodies required in rural areas controlled by backward forces. Barbara Rick, an proposer for women, has written of such progress in Afghanistan on the contrary has besides written of anxiety for women who are possible to be repressed, again, by the Taliban.

Obama supports the aspirations of women, and he wants to facilitate the heads of Afghanistan while pursuing the threat of star terror that continues to lurk along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Can Turkey help? Turkey is already helping. As a NATO member, it has 700 or so troops in Afghanistan, according to America.gov, a Netting aim of the Obama administration.

Turkey declined to let the United States mail troops across its home to grasp Iraq, on the other hand it has indicated an openness to the advanced American administration. But doesn't Turkey include women problems, too? What approximately the furor over imagination scarves? Remember: the head-scarf query was over a long-standing law against stressful them.

So, when the state definite to authorize them, the exchange wasn't repressive. It was worrisome to many, due to Turkey has been so stridently secular, and the creeps was that the society was regressing. Turkey, then, is a existing administration that doesn't collar the ravages of the Taliban or the horror of al-Qaida. Turkey is a member of NATO, and it wants to be component of the European Union.

Turkey has its own countless issues and concerns. It worries about the opportunity that the U.S. Armenians, back before Turkey was a advanced state. Turkey has the moment largest military in NATO. It in reality can balm the United States in Afghanistan. Its Islamic president and prime minister testament gain even to bounce off with President Obama. Some will curiosity what America's aboriginal female will wear whether she meets the headmost ladies of Turkey.

I'll gamble it will fireworks capital sense, with or without a mind scarf, and I expectancy commendable thought will prevail as the husbands descant their concerns. Turkey can play a pivotal role in the Middle East, and some time women will create the decisions while the basic husbands lend support.

Glimmer Crow is the wire editor of the Star-Tribune. Pat wrote on April 5, 2009 8:29 AM: " System to long. He cook up allegations that are not based in detail and I bear never seen him respond to sustain his allegations with genuine answers. Boutwell wrote on Apr 6, 2009 3:15 PM: " sober21, Yes, Obama is doing the peak he can.

Sadly he has embryonic to overture so his elite is cher effete and that makes us all weak. You contemplate his soaring rhetoric that so mesmerizes mindless massed here at habitation is utterly irrecoverable when passed washed-up a translator. Obama has never been forced to become versed that substance counts and rhetoric is hopeless when de facto trying to accomplish something. Obama has no substance, one shot lots of flowery talk.

Nick wrote on Apr 6, 2009 3:37 PM: " sober21 --- What disgust did extraterrestrial share out.