As the U.S. military winds down more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan this year, there are growing concerns about what will happen to the fragile progress of women's rights in those countries.
Those fears are underscored by the findings of a new Pew survey of the social and political attitudes of Muslims worldwide. According to the report, of the 23 countries surveyed, Iraq and Afghanistan are the only two countries where majorities of Muslims surveyed said that honor killings of women are justified as punishment for alleged pre- or extra-marital sex.
Interestingly, Pew also found that, across the countries surveyed, attitudes toward honor killings were not consistently linked to religious observance; Muslims who pray several times a day are just as likely to oppose honor killings as those who do not.
Together, those findings indicate a pervasive disregard for women's rights in both countries — one that is only likely to get worse as the U.S. troop presence and related human rights work diminishes.
The report also found that, as in many of the countries surveyed, support for making Islamic sharia the official "law of the land" is overwhelming among Muslims in Afghanistan (99 percent) and Iraq (91 percent).
These numbers alone are not alarming — interpretations of what sharia means and how it should be applied vary widely across the Muslim world. But Muslims who support sharia in Afghanistan and Iraq also favor a particularly harsh application of the law.
In Afghanistan, for example, 85 percent of Muslims who support sharia law say that adulterers should be stoned, while 81 percent of Muslims support severe punishments for theft and robbery, such as whippings and cutting off hands.
In Iraq, 58 percent majority of Muslims who support sharia law also support the stoning of adulterers, and 56 percent support corporeal punishments for stealing.
These findings — though not unique among the countries surveyed by Pew — could raise potential human rights alarm bells as both countries begin the long process of rebuilding their systems of jurisprudence in the wake of the U.S. exit.