The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the April 12 killing of Sitara Achakzai, a women's rights advocate in Afghanistan and a member of Kandahar's provincial assembly. Achakzai, who had returned to Afghanistan to fight for women's rights after living in Germany during the Taliban's rule, was shot outside her home after being approached by gunmen on motorcycles.

US drone attacks on Pakistan's northwestern borderlands are causing a massive humanitarian emergency, officials in Islamabad claimed after a new attack April 4 killed 13 people. The officials say up to 1 million people have fled their homes in the Tribal Areas to escape the US missile attacks as well as bombings by the Pakistani army.

Pakistan's newly re-instated chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has called a court hearing into a video in circulation showing the public flogging of a teenage girl in the northwestern Swat Valley, where a peace-for-sharia deal has been brokered with local Taliban leaders. He has ordered top officials from North West Frontier Province to appear and produce the girl, who is shown in the video being held down by two men while a third hits her with a strap as she cries out in pain.

Much of the international aid to Afghanistan over the past seven years has been spent to achieve military and political objectives, and the current approach to aid lacks "clarity, coherence and resolve," a group of international NGOs said in a report to the heads of NATO-member states. The report warns of over-reliance on short-term military gains at the expense of longer-term peace and development.

Authorities in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province are calling the release of a video of a 17-year-old girl being brutally flogged in public a deliberate attempt to sabotage the peace deal signed with the Taliban in the Swat Valley. The shocking two-minute video shows bearded Islamic militants—one of whom is apparently her brother—holding the girl down as she screams in pain. It was aired April 3 on a Pakistani TV talk show and has outraged public opinion in the country.

Judge John Bates of the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled March 31 that three detainees being held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan can proceed with habeas corpus challenges to their detention. The court's order rejects three of four motions brought by the US government to dismiss the habeas petitions of four foreign nationals, including one Afghan national, captured outside of Afghanistan and brought to Bagram, where they are currently held. The court's decision focused on whether the detainees, Fadi al-Maqaleh, Amin al-Bakri, Redha al-Najar, and Afghan national Haji Wazir, could invoke the Constitution's Suspension Clause. (Jurist, April 2)

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai has signed a law that women's advocates at the UN say "legalizes" rape. The new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage, and restricts a woman's right to leave the home, according to UN documents. "It is one of the worst bills passed by the parliament this century," said Shinkai Karokhail, a woman MP who campaigned against the legislation. "It is totally against women's rights. This law makes women more vulnerable."

This time it is none other than neocon whiz kid and former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, along with Justin Polin, a sidekick from the Hudson Institute, who favorably invoke the Sufis in a New York Times op-ed about Pakistan March 30. How frustrating that the attack on sufism by Pakistan's neo-Taliban receives practically no coverage in the international media—until war propagandists seize on it for their own cynical purposes...