Abdul Rahman was born an Afghan citizen. He was raised as a Muslim, the official religion of Afghanistan. But in 1990, while living in Germany, he converted to Christianity. Since then, he has practiced his religion in private, a constitutional right in modern Afghanistan, until two weeks ago.

Two weeks ago, Rahman was arrested and indicted for practicing Christianity. Rahman planned to plead guilty; the sentence would be death. Upon international outcry, he was freed and has since disappeared, likely hiding with his family in order to avoid assassination. Rahman was not freed because of any recognized flaw in the Afghan legal system. He was released because he was ruled mentally unfit for trial, a complete fallacy.

Before his release, he told an Italian newspaper he hoped not to die “but if God decides, I am ready to confront my choices, all the way.” These are not the words of an unbalanced man. In truth, the Afghan government noticed the controversy and released Rahman to avoid further trouble. But the case serves as an excellent reminder of Afghanistan, the nation that America has all but forgotten.

With the increasing tumult in Iraq and the truly terrifying nuclear situation in Iran, Afghanistan has been conspicuously absent from the news. Before this recent religious trouble, the latest Afghani story to appear in the U.S. news in any considerable way surrounded the questionable elections. The many voting problems included multiple registrations for single voters and extreme irregularities that favored the US-backed candidate Hamid Karzai (who eventually won). That story was published for about a week and disappeared without question. Since then, international news has concentrated on the growing Iraq civil war (rightly so) and tensions between the rogue anti-Western, Holocaust-denying Iranian government and the U.S. (ditto).

Those stories are immensely important, but they’ve obscured equally troubling events in Afghanistan. For instance, Afghanistan remains a major drug producer. Immediately after conquering the Taliban-led government, the allied forces of U.S. and Britain promised to reduce the Afghan poppy growth and opium export. Since the invasion in 2001, the opium trade is almost exactly the same. According to a Harvard report, it dropped a bit last year to around 10 percent, but experts predict a substantial increase in 2006. Afghanistan remains the world’s leading exporter of opium, which is used to manufacture heroin, producing nearly 90 percent of the world’s supply. Neither the new Afghan government nor the occupying American force has been able to counteract the problem. Not that they haven’t tried. Hundreds of millions of American tax-dollars (money from your pockets) have been spent to fight Afghan poppy growth and have done nothing. That’s money that could have been used to buy new books for public schools or go toward student financial aid. Nevertheless, the government continues to vainly pour this money into the seemingly unsolvable opium problem.

It would be a blessing if the Afghan drug supply were the only trouble being overlooked. Not so. Afghan military prisons have been the sites of many human-rights atrocities, almost without notice. In 2004 and 2005, nearly the entire world came out against the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. This helped being attention to the atrocities being committed in Iraq but, in the articles about prison-of-war abuse, Afghanistan was nowhere to be found. Although there were few revealing photographs of Afghan prisoners, the abuse was just as harsh, if not harsher. There were two reported homicides at Afghanistan’s Bagram detention center, compared to Abu Ghraib’s one. Other abuses at Bagram include a prisoner being hung his wrists from a ceiling fan and then being beaten 200 times in 24 hours, prisoners being forced to pick out bottle caps from a tub filled with human feces and water and a prisoner being beaten repeatedly because his torturers enjoyed hearing him cry, “Allah.” The abuses listen are in addition to the sort that was done at Abu Ghraib. The State Department first responded to the Afghan torture allegations as “ridiculous” but then changed its position after the autopsies of the two dead listed cause of death as “blunt force trauma.” All of this has gone virtually undetected by the American press.

Finally, it seems barely possible that the US-supported Afghan government would retain a law that forces all citizens to practice Islam, on pain of death. Hopefully, now that the spotlight is finally on Afghanistan, there will be some changes in favor of human rights. When the international community knows about a nation, there can be improvement. It would do us all good to stay up on the news of other nations, especially ones so closely tied to the US as Afghanistan.