So tell me, how does the Taliban in Afghanistan differ from the dogmatic, conservative Bible-banging religious "right" in the US (other than that they don't openly execute those who disagree with them)?


KABUL (Reuters) - More than two years after the fall of the hardline Islamic Taliban regime, state television has broadcast for the first time footage of an Afghan woman singing used old footage of Parasto, a well-known singer who now lives in the West, performing without a headscarf. The broadcast late on Monday will be seen as another small victory for moderate democrats led by President Hamid Karzai over religious conservatives opposed to many of the changes that have swept Kabul since the Taliban's collapse.

"We are endeavoring to perform our artistic works regardless of the issue of sex," Information and Culture Minister Sayed Makdoom Raheen told Reuters on Tuesday, when asked about the lifting of a ban on the broadcasting of women singing. The ban has been in place since 1992, when the "mujahideen," or holy warriors, came to power and fought factional battles that reduced much of Kabul to rubble and claimed tens of thousands of lives. The Taliban swept aside the mujahideen in 1996, and banned all television as part of its strict imposition of sharia law.

The mujahideen now form the backbone of the Northern Alliance, a faction of mainly Tajiks from the north who were instrumental in helping the U.S. military topple the Taliban in late 2001.