In what is surely to prove a test as to whether majority Islamic societies can embrace religious pluralism and tolerance, an Afghan man named Abdul Rahman is now facing charges of apostasy and rejecting Islam. The Afghan constitution, in an effort to placate both modernizers and traditionalists, ambiguously refers to both religious freedom and Sharia law as judicial guides. That a country—brutalized and shattered to be sure—attempting to enter the ranks of civilized nations could even allow for the possibility for such a lapse is disconcerting to say the least.

The National Review (often the redoubt of traditionalist reaction itself) puts it well:

We should have no illusions that Afghanistan — in many ways the backwater of the Islamic world — will soon embrace Western-style religious pluralism.

[T]he Rahman case is not a close call — killing or jailing someone for his religious beliefs is always wrong, and is especially galling in a country so dependent on American military forces and aid.

And to the conservatives who seem so willing to cut the administration some slack for its morally questionable albeit pragmatic compromises:

Conservatives in this country have been admirably willing to accept the compromises and frustrations that come with President Bush's attempts to reform recalcitrant parts of the world. The judicial murder of a Christian convert by a government that exists only on the basis of American power and good will, however, would be intolerable

So we are back to the old “can there be Islamic democracy” once again. This type of medievalist cruelty and thuggish ignorance gives ammunition to Western chauvinists who would leave Afghanistan and other corners of the world battered by theocracy and gratuitous despotism to their own devices. American military might is surely ethically smudged by its past behavior, but the mere fact that thousands of U.S. soldiers—of every creed, color and race—are fighting and dying for a pluralist democracy in a far-flung, strategically unimportant country demands that Afghan jurisprudence raise the bar a little higher.