The new taliban

There are as many as 10,000 Islamic schools in Karachi alone. Though the religious parties say they forbid political activities on their campuses, that's not what I found when I visited one such school in Sohrab Goth, a very poor area on the edge of Karachi.
This is a vast, sprawling, dusty neighborhood, which came into existence in the early 1980s when refugees from the war in Afghanistan poured into camps set up by the Pakistani government. The camps are long gone. Now a mix of second generation Afghans and Pakistanis live here in concrete buildings. A traditionally conservative area, women seldom leave their homes unaccompanied by men, and the Afghan traditional blue burqa is the norm.
In the 2002 elections, the religious parties made formidable gains -- for the first time in the country's history they took control of a quarter of the seats in parliament. More...