Pakistan's wild Northwest

Zafarullah Khan/AFP/Getty Images

Pakistan's decision yesterday to pull out of the Swat valley, essentially ceding control of the region to local Taliban militants, certainly represented a shift in security policy for Pakistan's new government. However, as this week's FP Photo Essay, "Springtime for the Taliban" vividly illustrates, these militants are already operating quite openly in much of Afghanistan border region, and enforcing their own brand of frontier justice.