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.
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