‘Pashtun custom is famous for its extreme seclusion of women which acts as marker for the respectability of the family.’

To re-establish their honour and identity after years of exile and war, Pashtuns developed ‘a radicalised Pashtun code, henceforth presented as true Islam, and this indeed is the situation today. … Thus many rural Pashtuns today pride themselves in keeping many of those injunctions which are expressly forbidden by Islam. … These include the levirate (widows being obliged to marry their deceased husband’s brother), the refusal of inheritance for women, the giving of daughters to compensate for a murder committed by a son of the family, ‘honour’ killings, blood feuds, the stoning of women on the suspicion of dalliance (as opposed to the proof required by Islamic courts). The ubiquitous burqa has become the symbol and uniform of this new kind of ethnicized Islamism, even in Northern Afghanistan.’

‘The hybrid constitution governing Afghanistan today brings together orthodox Shariah and conventional democratic forms that are completely at odds with the reality of equal rights within an Islamic state…. The major political formations depend on former warlords who remain close to fundamentalism.’

‘In 2005, the (Afghan) Chief Justice Minister, Shinwari, exclusively versed in Islamic law, attempted to institutionalize the repression of women, banning female singers, opposing co-education, and stating publicly his lack of reticence regarding stoning of ‘adulterous’ women. Shinwari was responsible for naming judges all over the country who like himself had no training in secular law.”

Meanwhile, five years of effort to import western values of sexual equality in Afghanistan don’t appear to have taken very deep root, otherwise the proposed law couldn’t have gotten as far as it has.