Why the Taliban Shot the Schoolgirl
Why the Taliban Shot the Schoolgirl
UNHAPPY IS THE nation that needs a hero, Brecht’s Galileo lamented. But even unhappier is the nation that needs a hero in a child. The attempted assassination by the Taliban of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in Pakistan is the most sickening measure of the low and broken condition of that country, all the cries of revulsion notwithstanding. In The Friday Times of Lahore, my old friend Najam Sethi, who founded the independent newsweekly in 1989, and is one of the most fearless journalists in this fearful world, wrote wrathfully that “leaders’ vague expressions such as ‘inhuman,’ ‘barbaric’ or ‘animal’ for the attackers, always followed by the remark that such people ‘cannot be Muslims,’ may allow Pakistan’s spineless power elites to temporarily save their own skins. But it only adds to the general confusion of ordinary Pakistanis, who are already conditioned by their textbooks, Friday khutbas [sermons], TV anchors and the state’s deliberately opaque policies towards extremists, to try to deduce from such dark innuendo which ‘foreign hand’ has dealt their country the latest blow. … The ‘case’ of Malala Yusufzai, as it will now be called, exposes several failures of the Pakistani state: the failure to protect its most vulnerable citizens; the failure to overhaul the repressive colonial systems of ‘governance’ that have bred nothing but banditry and warlordism in much of Pakistan’s north and west; and the state’s failure even to acknowledge, let alone fight, the menace of religious fanaticism, which is claiming its best and brightest one by one.”