Here are two stories that I read in the international press recently.

The body of a 20-year-old Iraqi girl turned up recently in a small Sunni town south of Tikrit. Her own family had killed her.

She had been having an affair with her cousin, but that was not the problem: cousins often marry in this part of the world. But they had decided to have sex and he had persuaded her to let him film this "just for us".

Of course, he could not resist showing the tape to his friends, to boast.
The pictures started to circulate in this small town and her family found out the couple had been sleeping together.

Honour demanded that they murder her - not him, naturally.

The US army officer telling me this story said his soldiers had wanted to find the boy involved and give him a good beating.

The officer, too, was furious, but also resigned to the situation. After more than a year here, he knew only too well that Salahaddin province was never going to be Kansas.

Paul Wood BBC News

Afghanistan's appeal court sentenced an Afghan journalist to 20 years in jail, commuting an earlier death sentence, for distributing an Internet article that said the Prophet Mohammad had ignored the rights of women.

Perwiz Kambakhsh, 23, a reporter with the Jahan-e Now daily, was sentenced to death in January by a court in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

The arrest and sentencing of Kambakhsh, also a university student, drew criticism from a number of Western nations, the Afghan media and rights groups. Kambakhsh downloaded an Iranian article from the Internet and distributed it to friends.

Samar Zwak, Reuters

I refer to these stories not to make some statement about the superiority of one culture over another but rather because they emanate from two countries in which considerable British resources are committed to building a better society. The main thrust of Western foreign policy is to promote democracy and individual freedom and even those who oppose intervention in Afghanistan or Iraq generally support the extension of Western ideas of liberty and governance to these countries. Yet these two stories beg the question, where do we draw the line? If we believe in fighting for democracy should we not also fight for women’s’ rights and the right to free speech? Alternatively if we should not impose Western cultural beliefs then why should we fight for anything, why not leave foreign cultures to their own devices? What is the point in fighting for a Government that will imprison a man for raising questions about women’s rights?

Most of the world’s cultures and societies developed over the course of 10,000 years in complete isolation from each other and it is inevitable that different societies will have different interpretations of what is wrong and right. That is not to say that humans are any different at a biological level or that there are any differences in intelligence, general behaviour or urges. However people are inevitably influenced by the dominant memes of their own culture. If Albert Einstein had been born to a Yammamo tribe he would have been just as intelligent but he would not have produced the General Theory of Relativity. Likewise if Iain Paisley had been to a Catholic family in Belfast then he would most probably be a Roman Catholic priest and an ardent Irish nationalist. Of course not everyone conforms to their society’s inherent cultural memes but the process of altering dominant cultural beliefs is generally slow and gradual. The process of change can only come from within and it is difficult to enforce from the outside. There are some interesting historical examples of attempts at rapid cultural change, for example the attempted reforms of Turkish society by Kemal Attaturk, the British attempts to stop the practice of suttee in India and the recent mass conversions of low-caste Indians to Christianity.

The BBC report alluded to the fact that the Americans have re-evaluated their idea of what they are trying to achieve in Iraq. The Americans hope to be able to contain the insurgency to the extent that the Iraqi Army can take over responsibility for protecting a reasonably stable Iraq. A relatively transparent and democratic Iraqi Government presiding over a stable Iraq would now represent Mission Accomplished. I don’t believe the West has truly worked out what it wants to achieve in Afghanistan; again the goal of a democratic Government and a contained insurgency is difficult but, perhaps attainable. Western intervention in Afghanistan has helped to improve life for many Afghans, but it is debatable whether the often miserable lives of girls in the isolated villages of rural Afghanistan will ever change.

The establishment of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq remain achievements, whether democracy should be imposed ‘by force’ is a difficult question to answer but it is clear that there are Americans, Brits, Iraqis and Afghans believe democracy is worth dying for. It is difficult to erase ingrained cultural norms, although MacArthur had some success in post-war Japan and perhaps democracy provides breathing space for cultural change to take place. Personally I believe there are certain unalienable rights which are available to very few across the world, how these rights should be spread is difficult to answer.