An unprecedented protest is unfolding in the Balochistan city of Quetta in Pakistan. Thousands of people have staged a sit-in, and are using 93 coffins to block a road to protest the slaughter of Shia Muslims by Sunni Muslim terrorists allied with the Taliban. In their demise is a warning to the rest of us. A nuclear power is about to collapse.

What happens now that a weary world is pulling up its military stakes in Afghanistan? Some worry that the gains women have made will be traded for a so-called peace with the fundamentalists. Don't believe it -- the women are poised to yank this primitive place into the 21st century. They are the reformers and they won't go home again.