We invaded Afghanistan to get Osama and then to help overthrow the Taleban and bring democracy to the country…at l;east that is how I see it.

How have we done so far?  Well, they have had elections….but unfortunately voting is not all there is to democracy regardless of what GW wanted us to believe.

An Afghan appeals court overturned a death sentence Tuesday for a journalism student accused of blasphemy for asking questions in class about women’s rights under Islam. But the judges still sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

The case against 24-year-old Parwez Kambakhsh, whose brother has angered Afghan warlords with his own writing, has come to symbolize Afghanistan’s slide toward an ultraconservative view on religious and individual freedoms.

Kambakhsh was studying journalism at Balkh University in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif and writing for local newspapers when he was arrested in October 2007.

Besides the accusation that Kambakhsh disrupted class with his questions, prosecutors also said he illegally distributed an article he printed off the Internet that asks why Islam does not modernize to give women equal rights. He also allegedly wrote his own comments on the paper.

In January, a lower court sentenced him to death in a trial critics have called flawed in part because Kambakhsh had no lawyer representing him. Muslim clerics welcomed that court’s decision and public demonstrations were held against the journalism student because of perceptions he had violated the tenets of Islam.

No matter how hard we try…somethings will always remain the same.