President Obama in Kabul

President Obama’s visit to Afghanistan on Sunday was a long overdue, and desperately needed, attempt to persuade President Hamid Karzai to clean up his act.

American officials have repeatedly warned Mr. Karzai that unless he truly commits to eradicating corruption (including among his own family members), improving governance and institutionalizing the rule of law, there is no chance of defeating the Taliban. Mr. Karzai has repeatedly shrugged off those warnings.

We hope that hearing it directly from the American president will finally make the difference. There is certainly no more time to waste.

Mr. Karzai has a long history of telling the international community what it wants to hear — while he and his aides continue to do whatever they choose.

The most outrageous example was the brazen attempt by Mr. Karzai’s loyalists to steal last year’s presidential election. After Washington — belatedly — cried foul, Mr. Karzai seemed inclined to mend his ways. His inaugural speech in November resonated with high-minded purpose, with promises to end the “culture of impunity.” But as Gen. James Jones, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, said en route to Kabul, the administration wanted Mr. Karzai to “understand that in his second term, there are certain things that have not been paid attention to, almost since Day 1.”

Mr. Karzai has strengthened the government’s anticorruption commission, and his attorney general is pressing forward on some cases involving former government figures. Still, corruption remains rife, including in Kandahar, where American and NATO forces are about to begin a major operation to rout the Taliban.

Mr. Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is the main power broker in Kandahar and reportedly has strong ties to the opium trade. If he is truly committed to rooting out corruption, President Karzai can start by pushing his brother to step aside as leader of the Kandahar provincial council.

He must also cut ties with many other corrupt officials and warlords and ensure that war criminals and human rights abusers are held accountable. His recent decision to sign a law giving amnesty to some of the worst offenders is especially worrying.

The United States and others rightly cried foul — the administration even canceled Mr. Karzai’s planned White House visit — after the Afghan president issued a decree that would allow him to appoint all of the members of the election watchdog commission that exposed the fraud in last year’s election. Mr. Karzai should reverse that decree and return to the previous and far more credible formula under which the United Nations chose three of the five members.

Mr. Obama made the right decision to send another 30,000 troops to help drive the Taliban out of important strongholds. But there is no way to hold those cities and towns without an effective Afghan government (at both the federal and local level) to take over. And after eight years of fighting, more than 1,000 American lives lost and more than $200 billion from American taxpayers spent, Mr. Karzai’s failure to build a credible, honest and even minimally effective government remains the Taliban’s No. 1 recruiting tool.

Mr. Karzai’s failure to devote maximum effort to fix his government is self-destructive. So is his recent cozying up to Iran’s repressive government — a clear effort to spite his American critics. We hope Mr. Obama told Mr. Karzai all of that in no uncertain terms. He will have to keep telling Mr. Karzai in the months ahead.

Source: New York Times

Pope Offers Apology, Not Penalty, for Sex Abuse Scandal

Faced with a church sexual abuse scandal spreading across Europe, Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday apologized directly to victims and their families in Ireland, expressing “shame and remorse” for what he called “sinful and criminal” acts committed by clergy.

But the pope did not require that church leaders be disciplined for past mistakes as some victims were hoping; nor did he clarify what critics see as contradictory Vatican rules they fear allow abuse to continue unpunished.

“You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry,” the pope said in a long-awaited, eight-page pastoral letter to Irish Catholics. “Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated.”

The strong letter was written in language at once passionate, personal and sweeping. And the pope did take the relatively rare step of ordering a special apostolic delegation to be sent to unspecified dioceses in Ireland to investigate. But even that action raised questions among critics who wondered what the investigators might unearth beyond what was found in two wide-ranging and scathing Irish government reports released last year. One of those reports said the church and the police in Ireland had systematically colluded in covering up decades of sexual abuse by priests in Dublin.

The pope has apologized before for sexual abuse scandals, most notably when meeting with victims in the United States.

The letter was especially anticipated after weeks of damaging reports that brought the scandals close not only to the leader of Ireland’s church, but to the pope himself.

The most recent revelation came last week when a psychiatrist who treated a priest decades ago in an archdiocese run by the future pope in Germany said he repeatedly warned that the accused priest should never work with children again. The priest was reassigned to pastoral work, but another church leader had taken responsibility for that decision.

The pope did not address that case in his letter, nor did he call for Cardinal Sean Brady, the leader of the Irish church, to resign. Cardinal Brady said last week that he would step down if the pope asked, after revelations that he took part in an investigation in 1975 in which two children were forced to sign secrecy oaths.

The letter also remained tightly focused on Ireland to the dismay of many victims’ groups around the world even as the crisis has widened among Catholics in Austria, the Netherlands and Germany.

In the letter, Benedict criticized bishops for “grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership.”

“There is still no full acknowledgment of the systematic institutional cover-up which is not restricted only to Ireland,” said Colm O’Gorman, the co-founder of a victims’ group called One in Four and the leader of Amnesty International in Ireland.

“I find that deceitful because we know that this is a global and systemic problem in the global church,” said Mr. O’Gorman, who said he was sexually abused by a priest as a teenager in Ireland in the early ‘80s. “It’s all about protecting the institution and, above all, its wealth,” he added.

For many Catholics, the letter offered a critical test of whether the pope can stem a widening crisis that has shaken the credibility and authority of the Roman Catholic Church in other parts of the world. Even as Benedict urged local clergy to cooperate with civil justice authorities, it has also put to the test a Vatican culture of protecting its own even in the face of crimes against civil and canon law.

Indeed, while many Irish Catholics were hoping for concrete measures and actions in the wake of the government reports, instead, Benedict offered a prescription for how to renew their faith, urging bishops to go on a spiritual retreat and dioceses to set aside special chapels where Catholics could pray for “healing and renewal.”

Terrence McKiernan, founder and president of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks Church records on abuse cases, said the pope’s letter revealed “the same Vatican reflexes.”

“There’s a strong tendency to approach this as a problem of faith, when it is a problem of church management and a lack of accountability,” Mr. McKiernan said.

The pope laid blame firmly with local Catholic leaders. “I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way church authorities in Ireland dealt with them,” he said.

In a news conference on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that the document was intended as a pastoral letter, not a document outlining “administrative or juridical measures.”

Indeed, Benedict spoke directly to the pain of victims. “Many of you found that, when you were courageous enough to speak of what happened to you, no one would listen,” the pope wrote.

“It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church,” he wrote.

Fonte: New York Times

How the 'new feminism' went wrong

From pole-dancing lessons to baking cupcakes, modern woman thinks she can do it all. Germaine Greer's free-thinking female eunuch has been replaced by the desperately self-inventing 'Madonna', argues Charlotte Raven, who looks back in shame at the moment in the 1990s when her generation turned its back on feminism.

Madonna on tour in 1990 Photograph: SANDY HILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Thanks to a string of celebrity sex stories, the world according to the tabloids has recently been – even more than usual – a sorry place for feminism. But among the countless snaps – of bikini-clad betrayed wives, distressed mistresses and pneumatic "hostesses" – perhaps the most disturbing was that of Katie Price's two-year-old daughter, Princess, in heavy makeup, complete with false eyelashes. Millions have seen it. The "debate" about it has been staged on all media platforms: on one TV talk show, a woman said she couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Her daughter was a "girly girl", like Princess. She "adored" dressing up and posing in front of cameras. It would be wrong to stop her, wouldn't it?

Katie Price's currency is as high today as when she published her million-selling autobiography in 2004. She has generated much outrage in the last few years, but it is nothing compared with her influence. Her narcissism no longer seems so aberrant. Women's belief in specialness and a concomitant sense of entitlement has inflated in line with Price's most famous assets.

How has it come to this? Feminists blame the sexists, Martin Amis et al, which is easy but unfair. In reality, we can't blame anyone but ourselves. While Price has been working tirelessly at getting her message across, the thinking women – the writers and journalists – who should have been putting the counter case have been indulging in a variety of "guilty pleasures" – from ogling young men (Germaine Greer in The Boy) to drooling over frocks (Linda Grant in The Thoughtful Dresser). Feminists have become increasingly frivolous, and as such are no match for Price, who is serious about her mission to win over all women to "Team Narcissist".

Two new exposés of the dehumanising effect of the Price worldview feel like too little too late. The fantasy world described in Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, where appearances are everything, has already come to pass. Today's young women are right to think they will be judged on how they seem, rather than who they are. In this context, Kat Banyard's promise to tell "the truth about women and men" in her new book The Equality Illusion is the promise of a horse-drawn plough in the machine age. The truth is no longer enough; she needs a promotional gimmick.

In a recent study of 1,000 British girls (admittedly by a mobile entertainment company), quoted in Walter's book, 60% said glamour modelling was their preferred career. A quarter said they would consider becoming lap dancers. By all measures, the value map has shifted in Price's favour.

Fonte: Guardian.co.uk