Pakistan on the Brink

[Toro]

Pakistan is almost as messed up as California.

Good article.

Pakistan on the Brink - The New York Review of Books

The present scare was set off in mid-February when the North-West Frontier provincial government signed a deal with a neo-Taliban movement in the scenic Swat valley, a major tourist resort area about a hundred miles from Islamabad, allowing the Taliban to impose strict sharia law in Swat's courts. (The creation of a new Islamic appeals court was announced by the Pakistani government on May 2.) In return for the Pakistani army withdrawing, the Taliban agreed to disarm, then promptly refused to do so. The accord followed the defeat in Swat last year of 12,000 government troops at the hands of some three thousand Taliban after bloody fighting, the blowing up of over one hundred girls' schools, heavy civilian casualties, and the mass exodus of one third of Swat's 1.5 million people. The Taliban swiftly imposed their brutal interpretation of sharia, which allowed for executions, floggings, and destruction of people's homes and girls' schools, as well as preventing women from leaving their homes and wiping out the families that had earlier resisted them.