Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai has confirmed that Abdul Rahman will not be executed for converting from Islam to Christianity. That's good news not just for Rahman himself, but also for relations between the West and the Islamic world.

To be sure, Afghanistan is a new democracy. In many ways, it is still finding its footing, and its citizens are learning what it means to be free and how that freedom must impact their society. It?s worth remembering that it took our society two hundred years and a bloody civil war to learn the lessons of equality and tolerance.
Nevertheless, Afghanistan?s leaders need not reinvent the wheel. They can learn from our mistakes and benefit from the lessons learned by thriving free societies all around the world. And they simply cannot and must not allow this prosecution to go forward ? in any form. To do so would send a clear signal that freedom is not growing in Afghanistan; it?s dying on the vine.

But this is about more than Mr. Rahman. This will be a persistent, recurring problem under Afghanistan?s sharia apostasy and blasphemy laws. The administration also needs to do more to ensure the reform Afghanistan?s judiciary. President Karzai must be encouraged to wrest it from the control of Islamists like Supreme Court Chief Justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari, who once told our National Public Radio that it is his duty as a judge to ?behead? those who do not conform to Islamic law. Americans continue to give billions of dollars, and sacrifice their lives to support the Afghan government. It not only serves compelling humanitarian interests to use this leverage now, but it would be a betrayal of America?s deepest national values not to.

Tim, I am, I hate to say, 51 years old, but it?s in my lifetime that black Americans were guaranteed the right to vote. Who are we to be so, so insistent that people must do this overnight? We?re working with the Afghan government. They?re moving in a democratic fashion. It?s going to be hard. But when something arises, as with Mr. Rahman, it is the obligation of the international community and of the United States?and there has been support across Europe for this?that the Afghans be reminded that in their own Constitution they have enshrined the universal declaration on human rights which guarantees certain religious freedoms. We didn?t have that Constitution with the Taliban to work with.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told CNN Sunday: "We've been very clear with the Afghan government that it has to understand the vital importance of religious freedom to democracy."

Those who argue that, given the violence and fanaticism we are encountering, we should get out of such countries as Afghanistan and Iraq, and leave them to their squalid fate, take an extremely irresponsible position. They must first explain what their alternative would be, to eliminate these countries as hatcheries of terror. They must consider the consequences of leaving elected, pro-Western governments, to be overthrown by ruthless psychopaths. They must justify abandoning the huge numbers of innocents who will be butchered and massacred when our troops withdraw -- including everyone who trusted us. And contemplate the effect this spectacle will have on our remaining allies.
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We cannot pretend for long, the way President Bush has been doing (albeit from humane and sound tactical motives to begin with), that the Shariah is compatible with freedom and democracy. The systems of government we advocate, or by necessity impose, must explicitly provide civil protection to non-Muslims and Muslims alike, against Shariah courts and their rulings. I have come to realize there is no alternative to this.