MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Taliban

In a dark place

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No School For You, Girl

For girls, attending school in Pakistan’s northwestern region has become a life threatening prospect. Since 2007, at least 168 schools have been blown up by local Taliban militia in their campaign to enforce their extremist interpretation of Sharia law which forbids girls from going to school.

In 1960, Rockwell painted a picture called “The Problem We All Live With,” showing kindergartner Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to attend an all-white school in the South, being escorted to school by US Marshals. In Pakistan, if the Taliban gets its way, girls will be marched away from school.

April 28, 2009
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The Taliban threat

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Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari and the Taliban

Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari and the Taliban

Last week the president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, signed off on a truce made in February with the Taliban in the Swat valley, which appears to have only emboldened them and increased their threat in the region.

On PBS NewsHour last night, Margaret Warner moderated a short segment about the Taliban in Pakistan. She interviewed Wendy Chamberlain, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and Husain Haqqani, the current Pakstani ambassador in Washington.

Ms. Chamberlain was a career foreign service officer who now heads the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to teach America about the Middle East and vice versa. Neither she nor her organization seems partial to hysterical rants, but her description of the Taliban in Pakistan is frightening: “Their goal is to topple the democratic government of Pakistan and they have a strategy that’s proved to be working, a strategy where they go into a district, go into a town, terrorize the local authorities, the civil society, the aid workers, women, barbers, and impose their law …”

To read the transcript of the NewsHour segment, go here.

April 28, 2009
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