Feminism is dead in Pakistan

The New York Times has an article by Declan Walsh about justice denied in Pakistan:

Pakistani officials said that a court had released eight of the ten men accused of conspiring in the shooting of the schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai (photo), in an admission that brought new scrutiny of Pakistan’s faltering efforts to try Islamist militants in the courts.
The men had been charged with organizing the 2012 attack on Yousafzai, who was shot in the head as she traveled to school in the northwestern Swat Valley. She survived her injuries, and went on to become a global symbol of defiance and an advocate for the education of girls, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in December of 2014.
Although the Taliban gunmen were believed to have fled to neighboring Afghanistan, the authorities announced the arrest of ten men and put them on trial in April of 2015 at a military-run internment center in Swat. The media and the public were barred from the hearings.
Malala Yousafzai, who is now seventeen, was shot in the head in October of 2012 when she was returning home from school with her classmates on a bus.
When the trial ended on 30 April 2015, a prosecutor told reporters that all ten had confessed to a role in the attack, and the police said they had been convicted and imprisoned for 25 years each. But when the court published its written judgment, it revealed that only two of the accused men, identified as Izharullah Rehman and Israrur Rehman, had been convicted and imprisoned, sentenced to life. The eight others had been freed. “They were released for lack of evidence,” said Azad Khan, the regional deputy police chief, adding that the government would probably appeal the decision.
Khan emphasized that there was “no conspiracy or mystery” in the case, and that the initial, mistaken reports of the convictions had stemmed from the secretive nature of the trial.
Still, news of the eight men’s release offered an illustration of the problems facing Pakistan’s judicial system, where incompetence, intimidation, and expediency can conspire to frustrate justice in even the highest-profile cases.
Pakistani courts frequently try Islamist militants behind closed doors to avoid threats against judges, police officers and witnesses. But such trials are hampered by poor evidentiary standards, and the security forces’ widely documented pattern of rounding up suspects, sometimes on flimsy grounds, and of obtaining confessions through torture.
Conditions are particularly difficult in the Swat Valley, where Yousafzai lived until the 2012 attack, because of continuing insecurity and because civilian authority is largely subordinate to the military, which mounted a major anti-militant operation in the valley in 2009.
In January of 2015, Pakistan’s Parliament voted to hand the military sweeping powers to try suspected Taliban fighters. In April of 2015, the military announced its first sentences in that system: six men condemned to death, and a seventh sentenced to life imprisonment.
But the military’s authority to hand down such strong sentences was challenged in the civilian courts, and the Supreme Court ruled that the sentences could not be carried out. Legal arguments on the validity of the military courts continued this week.
After the 2012 Taliban attack, Yousafzai was flown to Britain for emergency treatment. Her global celebrity as a symbol of defiance against the Taliban, and as a best-selling author and speaker, was cemented in December of 2014, when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside an Indian rights activist, Kailash Satyarthi, and became the youngest-ever Nobel laureate.
Now seventeen, Yousafzai lives with her family in Birmingham, England, where she is attending secondary school. Continuing Taliban threats have prevented her from returning to Pakistan, although she says she would like to go home.
Despite the strong military presence in Swat, militants continue to carry out sporadic attacks, often stealing into the valley from their hiding places across the border in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.
The Pakistani authorities say they believe that the four prime suspects in the attack on Yousafzai— the Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah; his spokesman, Sirajuddin; Habib ur-Rehman; and a militant known by a single name, Abdullah— are hiding in Afghanistan.

Rico says women gotta reread Lysistrata... (But isn't 'incompetence, intimidation, and expediency' what the wogs do best?) But someone's gotta figure out how to swat this schmucks... (And, though Babe Ruth would hate the comparison, he was the Sultan of Swat...)