I hope you’ve already read TIME’s much-discussed cover story on the Taliban’s often sadistic treatment of women, and the additional moral pressure it places on Barack Obama’s decision making about Afghanistan. (Which is not the same as saying that we must stay in Afghanistan, by the way.)
Along those lines comes an especially awful story from the western Afghan province of Herat, near the Iranian border:
The Taliban publicly flogged and then executed a pregnant Afghan widow by emptying three shots into her head for alleged adultery, police said on Monday.
Bibi Sanubar, 35, was kept in captivity for three days before she was shot dead in a public trial on Sunday by a local Taliban commander in the Qadis district of the rural western province Badghis.
The Taliban accused Sanubar of having an “illicit affair” that left her pregnant. She was first punished with 200 lashes in public before being shot, deputy provincial police chief Ghulam Mohammad Sayeedi told AFP.
“She was shot in the head in public while she was still pregnant,” Sayeedi said.
When imagining the role this question plays inside the Situation Room, I often come back to an essay that Hillary Clinton wrote for TIME in the fall of 2001:
Women’s rights are human rights. They are not simply American, or western customs. They are universal values which we have a responsibility to promote throughout the world, and especially in a place like Afghanistan.
It is not only the right thing to do; it is the smart thing to do. A post-Taliban Afghanistan where women’s rights are respected is much less likely to harbor terrorists in the future. Why? Because a society that values all its members, including women, is also likely to put a higher premium on life, opportunity and freedom—values that run directly counter to the evil designs of the Osama bin Laden’s of the world.
One wonders whether Clinton continues to make this case behind closed doors at the White House.