Author, Author -- Beware Deadly Critics

"Our investigation ... indicates that the militants had grievances against her for something she had written or told in the past, which was then turned into a film."
Afghan provincial police chief Gen. Dawlat Khan Zadran

A photo of Indian author Sushmita Banerjee, writer of the novel 'Kabuliwala's Bengali Wife', at a press conference in Mumbai. Getty Images

The fatwa issued by the Grand Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeine for the death of Salmon Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, on the basis that they were insulting to the Prophet Mohammad and therefore a death sentence was appropriate punishment, led the free world to mount a defence for the Indian writer; living in Britain, he was given protection from possible assassination, living in hiding for years, until the situation became less inflamed.

It would seem that Indian author Sushmita Banerjee's offence against Islam by writing of her experience married to an Afghan Muslim and living in Afghanistan under the Taliban, was an unpardonable sin. One which merited the punishment of death at the hands of merciless assailants.
According to the provincial chief of police, suspected Taliban terrorists tied up her husband while they dragged the author outside to shoot her to death.

And then they dumped her body close by a religious school; a madrassa, of course, a school funded by Saudi Wahhabi oil money, a school meant to turn out religious fanatics whose view of Islam would make them natural conscripts for the Taliban. The message clear enough; those who take the name and the purpose of Islam in vain must pay with their lives. Those who kill perform their duties to Islam.

Ms. Banerjee's sin was to write a memoir, A Kabuliwala's Bengali Wife. In which she wrote of her life in Afghanistan with her husband, and of her escape from the Taliban in 1995. A Bollywood film was produced from a screenplay of the memoir, Escape from Taliban. "The Taliban threatened to teach me a lesson" she wrote in an article for Outlook magazine, describing the Taliban ordering her to close a dispensary she was operating, branding her a "woman of poor morals."

She escaped from them by burrowing through the mud walls of a building where she was kept under house arrest, and then fleeing home to India. But she did return to Afghanistan to be reunited with her husband when the country was invaded by NATO troops and the Taliban dispersed. They are, however, on their way back, to resume their totalitarian theistic rule with the departure of NATO troops in 2014.

In the interim they have been busy. Targeting women. Two women holding positions of authority were killed in eastern Afghanistan last year. Najia Sediqi, acting head of women's affairs was shot to death; her predecessor, Hanifa Safi, killed with a car bomb. Quite obviously there is no discernible need for anyone in authority to represent the welfare of women in Afghanistan.

Another lawmaker representing Kandahar province, Fariba Ahmadi Kakar, was kidnapped by the Taliban last month. For her freedom they are demanding an exchange; the release of some of their members from incarceration.

Quite the challenging choice, that.