The Talibanization of Pakistan....

This is troubling....

Fearing to educate your daughter or to shave could be a flashback to Taliban-run Afghanistan in the 1990s - only this is Pakistan, where few officials now care to acknowledge the creeping influence of the ousted militant movement.

Statements by President Pervez Musharraf and local governors emphatically renounce Talibanization of Pakistan as the country works with the international community to contain radical militant elements in this volatile region.

Yet in the frontier territories by Afghanistan, media continue to report cases of Taliban infiltration of towns and cities to the point where they even assume law enforcement duties and parade criminals in the streets, supplanting mistrusted and inefficient state authorities.

'Where law and order and justice vanish, the Taliban emerge and the public response is positive because the people want protection, irrespective of who provides it,' a retired police official in the afflicted North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) told Pakistan's Daily Times newspaper.

Other police officials claimed that whole areas in the province have been 'taken over' by the Taliban.

In the armaments-making centre of Darra Adam Khel, located 30 kilometres from the NWFP capital Peshawar, militants reportedly threatened NGOs, terrorized music and video shop owners and staged bomb blasts by girls' schools to deter people from a profane and 'un- Islamic' lifestyle.

In December, a cleric in Darra went as far as declaring all multi- national companies, monetary institutions, the Red Cross and local NGOs as 'agents of the Jews and the West', prompting rights activists to demand government action against him.