Child Bride

I just started reading Kevin Sites' Hotzone. Sites is a journalist traveling to war zones all over the world and blogging what he finds. He's in Afghanistan now. This story is about an Afghan girl given in marriage at the age of four (!) and then subjected to torture and abuse at which I imagine even our president would blanche. (Who knows. If the sadistic father-in-law had uttered the magic word--terrorist--all bets would have to be off. Maybe he could have gotten the US military to do his dirty work for him.) Brutal story. But also a hopeful one for Afghanistan. In a country and culture where women are viewed as little more than slaves and women's rights are, at best, meaningless words on a piece of paper, it is a good sign that there were plenty of people to help this little girl, after her situation was discovered, from the police to ordinary locals.