You can't say 'this isn't religion', because Islam isn't a centralised religion with one voice speaking for all as with RCatholicism or the CoE. Sadly, if the Taliban says it is their brand of Islamic religion to crush women and girls, to treat them as if they were worth nothing even down to attempted murder and keeping them from proper medical attention, then actually it is. yes, they are basically terrorists, but they come armed with religion among their arsenal, and they are fueled by hatred that arises from their religious convictions.
Pakistan is looking more and more like a failed state. This is a very depressing piece (from before the slaying of bin Laden). It is not all the fault of GW Bush though. The Taliban are determined and 9/11 was part of their plans to take on American after all. Pakistan had gone over to the dark side a long time before 9/11, playing both the US and the Taliban.
The religious radicalism comes from Saudi Arabia:
'the madrasa- inspired and Saudi-financed advance of Wahhabi Islam, which is directly linked to the spread of anti-Western radicalization. On my last visit to Pakistan, it was very clear that while the Wahhabi-dominated North-West was on the verge of falling under the sway of the Taliban, the same was not true of the Sufi-dominated province of Sindh, which currently is quieter and safer than it has been for some time. Here in southern Pakistan, on the Indian border, Sufi Islam continues to act as a powerful defense against the puritanical fundamentalist Islam of the Wahhabi mullahs, which supports intolerance of all other faiths.'
This is the same radicalism that seeks to establish sharia law in the west so that Muslim women's lives can be dominated by 'Islam' and they cannot rely on the protection of western civil law.
I agree with Saffronwblue that Pakistan is a lawless place, with the Taliban running the show in the tribal areas in the north west and even in cities where the government is nominally in control you still get the hordes of men with seemingly nothing else to do but throw rocks at govt forces to protest the film that was released on the internet, for days.
Here is one of the problems.