Karzai has bowed to intense international pressure to scrap the law, described by the UN human rights chief in Afghanistan as "reminiscent of the decrees made by the Taliban regime".
It is said to forbid women to refuse to have sex with their husbands and force them to get their spouses' permission before leaving the house, looking for a job, going to the doctor or receiving education.
However, the whole episode is a likely to be a pretty magnificent recruiting tool for the Taliban and other assorted anti-NATO/Western groups in the country.
Karzai's reversal comes at the heels of a massive worldwide diplomatic freak out from (among others) Canada, the US, the UK, Australia and New Zealand (which has 140 troops there).
So while the countries currently putting lives on the line to keep Karzai's government in power had enough leverage to put a stop to this, the knowledge that Western foreign governments hold an effective veto over purely domestic law and policy is going to make for some great propaganda and recruiting.
Not that the Western governments were wrong to exert pressure over this, but that I have to wonder at Karzai's acumen that he thought he could get away with this. It was clearly supposed to be a low-profile domestic sop to the Shi'ite minority (about 19-25% of the population) and ends up leaving him revealed as NATO's servant. He has no one to blame but himself:
The bill lay dormant for more than a year, but in February it was rushed through parliament as President Karzai sought allies in a constitutional row over the upcoming election. Senator Humeira Namati claimed it wasn't even read out in the Upper House, let alone debated, before it was passed to the Supreme Court. "They accused me of being an unbeliever," she said.
Whatever slim chance of success there is in Afghanistan (however defined) is really not helped by this. Of course, the incident happening at all is demonstrative of how little hope there already was, but I can't see anything good coming of this. Large portions of the Northern Alliance are Shia, so it's not as if they don't have the capacity to take up arms against the NATO forces too, if they're sufficiently annoyed at having this law quashed at our behest.
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