Pakistan isn’t doing much to assuage Western fears that the country is headed for disaster.

President Asif Ali Zardari on Monday signed a rule allowing the Taliban to impose Sharia law in the Swat Valley. Many officials around the globe, as well as human-rights groups, reacted with alarm to the news that Sharia law was coming to Swat. They think the former tourist hot-spot will now be a safe haven for the Taliban and other insurgent groups.

This latest news certainly doesn’t quell those fears and many think it will only embolden the Taliban, which supports public whipping and other harsh punishments for women who challenge or break their repressive rules. 

"I don’t think this law is going to appease the Taliban. It’s just going to give them a taste of victory," Asma Jahangir, a United Nations specialist on religious freedoms, told The Guardian.

"If you are the Taliban and you believe in such public displays of harsh measures, you are then capable of doing anything, especially once you have legal cover," one Western diplomat in Islamabad told The Financial Times. "The danger is that these laws give cover to practices that have questionable legitimacy."

Meanwhile, there’s more proof the Taliban and insurgents are making more headway in Pakistan. The New York Times reports that the right-wing group has joined forces with local militant groups in Punjab, the impoverished province that is home to more than half the nation’s population. Officials in both Pakistan and the United States fear that this type of armed alliance poses a serious security risk, particularly because they were responsible for last fall’s bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, among other attacks.

"I don’t think a lot of people understand the gravity of the issue," a senior police official in Punjab told the Times. "If you want to destabilize Pakistan, you have to destabilize Punjab."