The last part of your post is easy to answer Karl !
Afghanistan was ruled by stupid, uneducated religious nutters, the very same people that shot Malala in the head, just because she wanted to go to school and learn. These idiots, the Taliban, treated all women appallingly...see the following wiki ::::
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban_treatment_of_women
The women were treated in an unprecedented cruel way. For instance, women were not allowed to be examined by a male doctor or nurse, only by another woman. But as women were not allowed to be educated, there wasn't anywhere near enough female medical practitioners, and therefore 10,000's of women died in childbirth or became seriously ill. Another consequence of the backward thinking of the Taliban, is that schooling for boys also ground to a halt, as most teachers were women.
The Taliban often targets health officials that work to immunise children against polio due to fears of the vaccine, including the fear that it is used to gather intelligence about their organisation. So normal childhood illnesses that have become overwhelmingly controlled in the West, killed 100,000's of Afghani kids every year.
Despite the Taliban's so-called religious piety, they saw no problem with cultivating Heroin on an industrial scale, thus causing untold misery within its own people, as well as the free world.
The list of Taliban horrors is endless Karl and easily researched on the 'net.