Update: an attentive reader noticed what I didn’t: this story is dated 2003. This of course doesn’t make it an atom less revolting, it just makes it not Breaking News. (I must say, I didn’t know NWFP was that bad five years ago…)

What was that I was saying about what worthless malevolent thuggish bastards the Taliban are?

Male doctors and technicians have been banned from carrying out ultrasound examinations and using electrocardiographs (ECG) on female patients by the Islamist government of Pakistan’s North West Frontier province in its latest step towards “Talibanisation”. The ban effectively excludes all women from undergoing such crucial medical examinations as the province has only one female ECG technician and none trained in ultrasound.

Read more about Malalai Kakar, murdered by the brave pious merciful compassionate caring decent Taliban. (Thanks to mirax for the link.)

Most mornings, before her children wake, she peeks out her front door to look for a “night letter”-a death threat from the Taliban pinned to her home that she doesn’t want her children to see. “The notes say things like ‘Quit the force, or else,'” she says, with a thin smile. “Of course, I won’t.”…Malalai points out that women’s participation in law enforcement is not just about them. It is about the thousands of women in Kandahar who have been denied police assistance time and again, because the Muslim community does not allow men to interact closely with

This upsets me so much I can hardly see straight – the head of Kandahar’s department of crimes against women murdered on her way to work. Bastards, bastards, bastards.

Taleban rebels, who banned women from joining the police when they were in power, said they had carried out the shooting. “We killed Malalai Kakar,” a Taleban spokesman told AFP news agency. “She was our target, and we successfully eliminated our target.”

Well aren’t you clever. That’s a real accomplishment, isn’t it – you had guns, and so you were able to shoot someone to death. Guess what – anybody can do that. It’s easy, it’s cheap, it’s cowardly; anybody can do it. But it’s only low-life thuggish bullying chickenshit … Read the rest