Afghan Teacher Beheaded

"In Afghanistan, young girls go to school and women serve in government because America helped liberate the Afghan people."
-Laura Bush, speaking on International Women's Day (March 8)

The AP is reporting that Taliban militants beheaded Malim Abdul Habib, a teacher in a central Afghan town, while his wife and eight children watched.

Why aren't the Muslims who took to the streets to protest the cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed raising hell over this beheading?

Habib was the headmaster of Shaikh Mathi Baba high school, which is attended by 1,300 boys and girls.

Zabul, a remote and mountainous province populated mainly by Pashtuns and bordering Pakistan, is a hotbed of Taliban militancy. The former Taliban regime prohibited girls from attending school as part of its widely criticized drive to establish what it considered a "pure" Islamic state.

Zabul province's education director, Nabi Khushal, blamed Taliban rebels for the killing.

"Only the Taliban are against girls being educated," he said. "The Taliban often attack our teachers and beat them. But this is the first time one has been killed in this province."

Cleric Sayed Omer Munib, a member of the nation's top Islamic council, said there was no justification in Islam's holy book, the Quran, to prevent girls from studying.

"Nowhere in the Quran does it say that girls do not have the right to education," he said. "It says that 'people should be educated.' This means girls, too."

It's true that hundreds of thousands of girls have returned to school since we bombed Afghanistan and temporarily ousted the Taliban in 2001, but for the Bush administration to use Afghanistan as an example of how we've 'successfully' spread democracy to the Middle East is misleading and insulting to the Afghan people.

The Taliban are still in power and continue to attack girls' schools and teachers across the country.