A wake-up call for Pakistan's broken society

Karamatullah K Ghori

The barbaric attempt on the life of a 14-year-old schoolgirl last Tuesday by Taliban terrorists has spawned a state of trauma and national mourning in Pakistan. It's unlike other incidents that have hit the tragedy-prone country with a devastating frequency in recent years.

Malala Yusafzai, the innocent victim of the Pakistani Taliban's bloodlust, rose to prominence three years ago when, as an 11-year-old from the picturesque Swat Valley, she challenged the Taliban edict that girls shouldn't get an education. The Taliban, with their archaic, stone-age mentality, were then in control of Swat, and the Pakistan Army had just mounted a major military offensive against them. The militants had torched scores of schools for girls and threatened to deface with acid burns any girl seen going to a school.

The brave and indomitable Malala - whose father runs a private school for girls in Mingora, the administrative seat of Swat - had publicly defied the Taliban obscurantism by reminding their religious brigade that education was her birthright as both a Pakistani and a Muslim. She had the gumption to remind them that what they were demanding of her, and every other Pakistani girl, flew in the face of the Prophet Muhammad's categorical command that pursuit of knowledge was incumbent upon every Muslim man and woman.

Malala's bravado made her a celebrity; she became an icon to those who abhorred the Taliban's anachronistic and wayward interpretation of their religion. Once the Taliban brigands had been driven out of Swat, Malala was showered with government recognition and accolades. She became a standard-bearer of the Pakistani secularists and religious moderates who loathed the Taliban's craving to turn the clock back to the Middle Ages and deny the benefits of education to half the country's population.

However, for the revanchist Taliban, whose bloodlust is apparently insatiable and who believe in settling every issue at the point of a gun, Malala had become a marked person, irrespective of the fact that she was just a child.

It was not that Malala was not conscious of the danger she faced at the hands of the barbarians she had brazenly challenged on their own turf. In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp a year ago - when she was still basking in the spotlight of fame and popular recognition - she had so stated:

The situation in Swat was normal until the Taliban appeared and destroyed the peace of Swat. They started their inhuman activities; they slaughtered people in the squares of Mingora, and they killed so many innocent people. Their first target was schools, especially girls' schools. They blasted so many girls' schools - more than 400 schools and more than 50,000 students suffered under the Taliban. We were afraid the Taliban might throw acid on our faces, or might kidnap us. They were barbarians; they could do anything.

The "barbarians" managed to get back to their quarry and shoot her, in broad daylight in Mingora when she and her classmates were returning home from their school in a bus. It has shocked Pakistan's 180 million people out of their wits that, despite the military establishment's touted claims that it had purged Swat of the Taliban scourge, the pestilence has not only staged a comeback butwith a bang by settling scores with its well-known nemesis. It does not, apparently, bother the conscience of the bloodthirsty avengers that their nemesis was just 14.

The Pakistani people are shell-shocked, not only at the daring of the Taliban but much more at the appalling failure of the country's military and civil establishments to provide security to a brave little girl who was known to be a marked target in the Taliban book. The country's political leadership had cheered Malala's courage to take on the Taliban jackals in their lair but apparently did precious little to save her from the reach of their predatory revenge.

For the Pakistani intelligentsia and the infamous "silent majority" the shock is, however, anchored in something much larger than the hourly media sound bites keeping them up to date on Malala's medical condition, or the dismaying pictures from her bedside at the Combined Military Hospital in Rawalpindi where Pakistan's top-notch doctors and surgeons were fighting hard to save her life. (On Monday, Malala was ferried to Britain in an air ambulance provided by the United Arab Emirates government for special medical treatment and care.)

The trauma of Pakistan's thinking and chattering classes is focused on the larger question: Why did this happen? How could a society as traditional and ritualistic as Pakistan's - where women are sheltered and protected with special attention because of common perception of their being the weaker gender - allow a frenzied band of religious zealots like the Taliban to acquire so much power and authority as to become a menace to everyone - men, women and even children?

The answer, or answers, to this and related questions are of course well known to any Pakistani with his thinking cap on his head; it's another matter entirely to state the answer loud and clear.

The scourge of the Taliban has become a men-eating and children-devouring monster, not overnight but because of the laxity the whole society of Pakistan has been showing to this menace over a long period.

The genesis of the Taliban is generally traced to the Afghan struggle against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The religious-minded zealots were plied with money and weapons by all those - Pakistan and its Arab and Western friends included - who thought that these firebrand mujahideen inspired by the religious sense of martyrdom could knock the ground from under the feet of the Russians. They did. But once that feat was achieved, the genie refused to go back into the bottle.

Pakistan virtually committed hara-kiri by treating the Taliban with kid gloves and allowing them to dig their heels into Pakistan's welcoming soil. The military and political establishment was daydreaming that the Taliban would provide strategic "depth" to Pakistan, vis-a-vis Afghanistan, and give a free hand to its forces against the "real enemy", India.

However, to the Taliban there couldn't be a more fertile place to sow the seeds of their archaic version of Islam than Pakistan's moribund society, already plagued by a decaying feudal system and afflicted with mendacity, corruption and wanton illiteracy.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Taliban have feasted on the inadequacies and glaring contradictions of Pakistan's broken society, where the word of mouth of a half-baked mullah carries more weight with hordes of illiterate masses than the writ of the government.

The rational segment of the Pakistanis - woefully fewer in number than the legions of faux messiahs with ready-made potions of elixir to cure the nation's festering wounds - have known for long that the menace lies within the body politic of Pakistan. The brazen attempt on the life of a 14-year-old social activist - whose crime in the eyes of her predatory assassins was that she preached education for girls of Pakistan - should be an eye-opener to anyone inclined to stem the rot.

Since the enemy is within, the battle against it will have to be waged by the Pakistanis themselves. They must take on the genie unleashed by them because of their weird logic and convoluted sense of religion. The time to act is now; delay will only escalate the cost and whet the appetite of the monsters threatening to bring down the ramparts of Pakistan.

Karamatullah K Ghori is a retired Pakistani ambassador and career diplomat, now a freelance columnist and commentator. He may be reached at K_K_ghori@yahoo.com.