The deal to allow the Taliban to administer shari’a law in Swat has produced predictable results.  Instead of pacifying the radical Islamists, they have grown emboldened enough to demand that Pakistan impose shari’a over the entire nation:

The Taliban in Pakistan have issued a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Pakistani government, by declaring the country’s entire legal system “un-Islamic.”

“Let the judges and the lawyers go to Islamic university,” said Muslim Khan, a Taliban spokesman in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. “(After) they learn Islamic rules, Islamic regulation, they can continue to work.”

In a telephone interview Tuesday with CNN, Khan demanded the imposition of Islamic sharia law all across the country. He also called for the creation of jaziya, an Islamic tax, to be levied on all non-Muslims in Pakistan. And Khan denounced any Pakistanis who disagreed with his interpretation of Islam, calling them “non-Muslims.”

How’s that appeasement working out for you, Ali Zardari?  Feel any safer since allowing the lunatics to run the asylum in Swat?

The attack on the legal community is no accident.  The attorneys have pushed off shari’a for years, and have mostly defied the radicals.  That’s why Khan and his followers consider them their primary opponents, at least in the political sense — and maybe in all other senses as well, after the surrender in Swat by Islamabad.

However, as CNN reports, the legal community may have already begun to retreat.  They could not get a response on the record on Khan’s comments from any of the leading legal figures.  Once the government surrendered, they read the writing on the wall.