By Karamatullah K Ghori
25th October 2012 12:04 AM
The crime was heinous and barbaric, to say the very least. Shooting an unarmed 14 year-old girl in the head, from point-blank range — while she was on her way home from school in a school bus—could only be the work of a predatory murderer. It was cowardly and cold-blooded in the extreme. Little surprise, therefore, that it traumatised Pakistan and its shock waves went viral across the world in no time.
The shooting of Malala Yousufzai, a frail little girl from Pakistan’s picturesque Swat Valley, in the town of Mingora, last October 9, by the murderous Taliban literally drove the daylight out of the Pakistanis. It was hard for even the most stout-hearted to understand what had the innocent girl done to deserve the Taliban wrath and savagery. However, in the eyes of the stone-aged Taliban aficionados Malala was guilty of a major crime in their book: she preached for the right of Pakistani girls to get an education.
Malala had shot to international fame and prominence three years ago, at the tender age of just 11, when she publicly challenged the Taliban practice of closing down, or destroying girls’ schools and forcing them to stay within the four walls of their homes.
The daughter of a father who ran a private school for girls, Malala refused to be cowed down by the Taliban terror. In front of television cameras she exposed the illogicality of the Taliban edict to deny girls of Swat the right of education. She reminded them—and the world—that what the Taliban were demanding flew in the face of the tenets of Islam and the teachings of its Holy Prophet Muhammad who intoned his followers that acquisition of knowledge was incumbent upon all Muslim men and women.
2009, when Malala called the bluff of the murderous Taliban of Pakistan was a time of great turbulence and tribulation for the people of her idyllic Swat. The Taliban had been infesting the once-peaceful and tranquil valley with their archaic practices and trying to take it back to the Middle Ages. When they openly challenged the writ of the state, the Pakistan army—which had earlier signed more than one peace deal with them, only to see the intransigent Taliban abusing the truce—was left with no other alternative but undertake a bloody offensive to purge them from the valley.
In the backdrop of that chaotic time Malala’s bravado in standing up to bestial bullies was seen as a very courageous act. She became a poster-girl for Pakistan’s silent majority fed up with the Taliban’s obscurantism. The government, although mired in corruption and unable to work out a viable strategy to deal with the Taliban scourge, was also moved to take notice of the courageous little girl; she was showered with national recognition and accolades.
She became an overnight celebrity, with her fame travelling outside of Pakistan; she became an icon to a world aghast at the Taliban’s archaic philosophy in which the female of the human species was to be perennially shut out as something less than human. But the Taliban ultimately getting their marked quarry, and shooting her in broad daylight in the heart of Mingora—the city supposed to have been purged of their menace—shocked the Pakistanis out of their wits and exposed the vacuity of the civil and military establishment’s claim that the Taliban had been driven out of Swat and the valley was beyond their murderous reach.
Miraculously, Malala has survived the attempt on her life. Taken first into the care of the Combined Military Hospital, in Rawalpindi, the seat of the military establishment, she was later flown out to the UK where she is being treated in the city of Birmingham’s world-renowned Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Malala, it is learnt, has regained consciousness and is on recovery, though still not quite out of the woods.
In Pakistan, however, the sense of national outrage and revulsion that the barbaric attempt to silence her forever had triggered seems to be simpering down. Malala’s suffering had touched the Pakistanis’ raw and sensitive nerves. The people’s consternation was reminiscent of the tragedy that had visited them when Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s most charismatic politician and leader, had been murdered—in identical circumstances—by the same blood-thirsty Taliban five years ago.
In the wake of the latest tragedy, every Pakistani felt entitled to ask the obvious question agitating their mind: are the Taliban so powerful that they can zero in on anyone in their gun-sights, or is the gargantuan state security apparatus so weak and ineffective as to give a free pass to predatory murderers to breach it at their choosing?
The unprecedented outpouring of support for Malala, and the outrage felt by the man-on-the-street and arm-chair intelligentsia, alike, was massive and spontaneous. The people of Pakistan grieved the suffering of an innocent girl as if she was their own daughter. But more than that she became, in an instant, a symbol of resistance to those who wanted to deny the women of Pakistan the rights their religion and the country’s Constitution confer on them.
The initial reaction to the outrage from the officialdom and political parties of the country appeared to be in sync with the popular mood. Political parties joined the chorus of condemnation, though not all of them did so with equal enthusiasm or gusto. The military brass chimed in, too, and military chief, General Kayani, used harsh words to condemn the Taliban daring, prompting observers to reason that the long-delayed military offensive against the Taliban strong-hold in North Waziristan was close to being unleashed.
The latest indications from GHQ suggest the bells rung by the Malala episode are quickly losing resonance and the generals, never divorced from expediency, are having second thought about the need for calling the Taliban bluff. Fazed political pundits are turning back to their crystal balls to see what’s holding back the military brass. The only explanation they could come up with for the generals’ dithering is GHQ’s calculation that, in the not-too-distant-future, the Taliban could still be more of an asset than a haunting liability.
Redemption for a bleeding and broken Pakistan is still distant; perhaps more distant than the hoped-for recovery of Malala. She’s as much a victim of the Pakistani establishment’s perversity as of the Taliban’s barbarity.
Karamatullah K Ghori is a former Pakistani diplomat.
E-mail:k_k_ghori@yahoo.com
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