"Earlier this year, he pardoned five convicted heroin traffickers, apparently to win the support of an important political family in Jalalabad. “It’s not pardoning criminals, it’s giving a new opportunity to an 18 year old whose family paid tremendous sacrifice for this land,” he told me. Yet by contrast for a year he refused endless pleas from diplomats to pardon Pervez Kambaksh, a 23-year-old journalist sentenced to death for downloading material on women’s rights from the
Internet."