Wherein I must allude to disemboweling, and not the fun kind of disemboweling

So I’m reading down the table of contents page for Wednesday’s Independent, and there’s this lovely headline from Afghanistan: “Disembowelled, Then Torn Apart: The Price of Daring to Teach Girls.” In one of those speeches in the Baltics yesterday, Bush bragged that there are now 2 million girls being taught in Afghanistan, whereas under the Taliban there were 0. I’m pretty sure he didn’t say anything about the whole disemboweling thing. (If you read the article you may notice a similarity between the description of what the Taliban did to one of the four teachers they killed in Ghazni and what the French did to Robert Damiens in 1757 for the attempted regicide of Louis XV) (only with motorbikes instead of horses).

Anyway, on the Indy’s contents page, that story is followed by a palate-cleanser, “Bollywood Breathes Sigh of Relief as Idol Is Cleared of Bombing,” and then it’s on to “Five Young Girls Killed in US Attack on Iraqi Insurgents.” Let’s stop presenting our military adventures as acts of feminist liberation, is all I’m saying.

The Guardian also has a long article on the position of women in Afghanistan.