"They're savages here, one and all"

That's what Peachy said about the inhabitants of Kafiristan, just before Danny's wedding, in the movie version of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. 

Some may think that Kafiristan is a fictional place, that no people in this day and age (or Kipling's 19th century Raj) could be so backward and barbaric. They would be wrong. A Google search for "Kafiristan" - try "Waziristan" too - will reveal that it's an area straddling the northern part of the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The people there are pretty much as pictured. Only the rifles disclose that this is a fairly modern picture. The people are as they were in Kipling's day, and for centuries before. Always have been and always will be, the benificences of the Western invaders and foreign aiders notwithstanding. Here's a story from the Swat Valley -- same region -- as found on AP today.

Earlier today, a Taliban gunman walked up to a bus taking children home from school and shot and wounded Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year-old activist well known for championing the education of girls and publicizing atrocities committed by the Taliban. For her work in promoting the schooling of girls -- one of the things we're fighting for in Afghanistan, right? -- Malala was nominated last year for the International Children's Peace Prize.

The Taliban take a different view. Their spokesthingy, Ahsanullah Ahsan said, “This was a new chapter of obscenity, and we have to finish this chapter.  [That's why] we have carried out this attack.”

Meanwhile (Sherin Zada writes) the problems of young women in Pakistan are the focus of a case before the high court, which ordered a probe into an alleged barter of seven girls to settle a blood feud in the remote Dera Bugti district of Baluchistan province.

The district deputy commissioner told the court that a council of the Bugti tribe, one of the more prominent tribes in the province, ordered the barter in early September to settle a feud between two sub-tribes. He did not know the girls' ages but local media reported they were between 4 and 13 years old.

The tradition of families exchanging unmarried girls to settle feuds is supposedly banned under Pakistani law but still practised in the country's more remote tribal areas, where Sharia law and a militant form of Islam still hold sway. Apparently the denigration and abuse of women and girls is OK, according to "the religion of peace".