Qatar appears to have an admirable degree of press freedom and civil liberties, but it is not a democracy! The Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani is the absolute ruler, and the position passes from father to son.

I was watching a journalist from Al-Jazeera interview one of the Taliban mullahs and it struck me that they were speaking to each other in Arabic, not an Afghan language w/ interpreters. Islam considers not only the Koran as holy but also the Arabic language, and the Koran is (generally) NOT translated into local languages, but studied in Arabic. Muslim scholars also pride themselves on having a firm command of Arabic. So, when a country such as Afghanistan becomes more purely Islamic (at least in their eyes) it's not at all inaccurate to desribe them as becoming more Arabic, and to describe Afghanistan as a quasi-Arab country.