The triumph of law based on the will of citizens is generally considered to be one over barbarity, not over civilization. But an election time political pander by Afghan president Hamid Karzai shows how legislation can and does represent regress rather than progress in Western terms, calling into question the motives of the leader the US sees as its closest domestic ally, and so of the occupying force itself as well as the ideology behind them and pushing ever forward, obstacles and all.
Without even getting into the specifics of the "marital rape" law, its ill conception is apparent in its institutionalization of the predominant division of Muslims between Sunnis and Shiites, as it applies only to the latter, who make up 20 percent of the war-torn population. If a fifty-fifty split between men and women is assumed, ten percent of voting citizens the rights of whom the US claims it is trying to restore in combating terrorists are being violated, legally and corporeally. This recalls the "separate but equal" illusion in America only two generations ago, but takes it a step farther in creating a gendered division within one of the separated groups. So an accurate tagline becomes "separate but unequally unequal."
The legislation itself stipulates that wives are "bound to preen for her husband as and when he desires" and husbands have "the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night." Further, "Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband." In contrast, woman receive this pseudo-right: "man should not avoid having sexual relations with his wife longer than once every four months." Four days for men, four months for women, let's call the whole thing off. But doing so would run counter to the progressively democratic principles supposedly being replicated by the US (and NATO, sort of) there.
A comparable situation arose when the US supported the Taliban in its fight against USSR occupation: once the Soviets left, the Taliban was left hanging by its former supporters, and proceeded to try to run the country in ways that displeased the US, to say the least. Obama called the marital rape law "abhorrent," but then again so did in his own way Bush Jr. with the Taliban's Islamist regime. The point is that, however defined, progress imposed from the outside in rarely if ever takes deep enough roots to bear fruit immediately or in the long-term. Even in America, democracy, law and policy alike are still trial-and-error processes, and therein lies the progress they can and do bring about, social, cultural, economic, political or otherwise.
If to deny such organic experimentations is regressive, and to overlook them when they fail is unacceptable as the marital rape law makes painfully clear, then the whole "exporting democracy and the rule of law" ideology needs serious reconsideration in order to remain viable. Reproducing a political, economic or other kind of system means reproducing its flaws as well as its benefits, and in this sense the marital rape law can be taken as a metaphor for the US proselytizing in world affairs as a shortsighted, ulteriorly-motivated current event creating a future with severe short-term memory problems.
