...a valley and an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistain, located 99 mi from Islamabad. It is inhabited mostly by Pashto speakers. The place has gone steadily downhill since the days when Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat...region, the schoolgirl aspired to a career in medicine.
At some point she changed her mind. She decided she wanted to be a politician instead. "This country badly needs sincere leadership," she told Newsweek correspondent Sami Yousafzai last year. How very true.
Any number of Pak leaders have claimed to share the public revulsion occasioned by last week's attempt to kill Malala. Far too many of them have not, however, been able to bring themselves to blame the Taliban for this act of extraordinary barbarity -- notwithstanding the fact that Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain (TTP) lost little time in proudly taking responsibility for trying to kill a 14-year-old girl.
A front man for that organization declared that the TTP was obliged to eliminate anyone who "leads a campaign against Islam and Sharia" and that Malala's primary crime was her "pioneer role in preaching secularism and so-called enlightened moderation".
Malala has not, by any stretch of the imagination, campaigned against Islam. Her activism has chiefly focused on the right of all children -- especially girls -- to an education.
Yes, everyone knows educated women are the Taliban's bête noire. Everyone also ought to know this mindset militates against all facets of common sense. It can appeal only to those who are keen to perpetuate and reinforce Pakistain's dark ages.
These date back to the Zia ul Haq
...the creepy-looking former dictator of Pakistain. Zia was an Islamic nutball who imposed his nutballery on the rest of the country with the enthusiastic assistance of the nation's religious parties, which are populated by other nutballs. He was appointed Chief of Army Staff in 1976 by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, whom he hanged when he seized power. His time in office was a period of repression, with hundreds of thousands of political rivals, minorities, and journalists executed or tortured, including senior general officers convicted in coup-d'état plots, who would normally be above the law. As part of his alliance with the religious parties, his government helped run the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, providing safe havens, American equipiment, Saudi money, and Pak handlers to selected mujaheddin. Zia died along with several of his top generals and admirals and the then United States Ambassador to Pakistain Arnold Lewis Raphel when he was assassinated in a suspicious air crash near Bahawalpur in 1988...regime's campaign to enshroud and confine Pak women, when the slogan was 'chaddar aur chardiwari'. It was resisted, of course, yet its consequences were alarming. I recall returning to Lahore in 1983 after three years abroad, and being gobsmacked by the fact that hardly any women were to be seen on the streets. (Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It may be the largest city in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
, in contrast, served as a useful reminder that humanity indeed consisted of two sexes.)
Even Zia wasn't quite stupid enough to seek to outlaw education for girls, although many of the Mujahideen he sponsored in Afghanistan, on behalf of the United States, took particular pride in targeting coeducational schools and teachers who taught female students. When the Taliban took over in that country, they immediately took aim at women's already meagre rights.
In her native Swat, Malala's particular beef against the Taliban who held sway in the region for a couple of years was their attacks on girls' schools. One of her diary entries noted that her school had advised girls against wearing their uniforms, for fear of attracting the Taliban's attention. When the girls turned up in colourful attire, they were told that too might not go down well with the self-anointed purveyors of a primitive, misogynist morality.
This was the sort of fascism
...a political system developed in Italia symbolized by the Roman
fasces-- thin reeds, each flimsy in itself but unbreakable when bound into a bundle. The word is nowadays thrown around by all sorts of people who have no idea what they're talking about...
in the face of which Malala precociously took a stand. She realised the price it could entail. "Sometimes I imagine I'm going along and the Taliban stop me," she has been quoted, in the Guardian, as saying on a television talk show last year. "I take my sandal and hit them on the face and say what you're doing is wrong. Education is our right, don't take it from us.
"There is this quality in me -- I'm ready for all situations. So even if they kill me, I'll first say to them what you're doing is wrong."
The obvious silver lining in the context of last week's events is that Malala survived the Taliban attack -- carried out, tellingly, while she was returning home from school in Mingora -- and it remains possible to hope she will make a full recovery.
Another glimmer of hope has resided in the hardly unreasonable expectation that such a dastardly act, followed by the TTP's outrageous threat to target the courageous child again, would turn public opinion against the Taliban more decisively than before. That has occurred to a certain extent, with condemnation of the attack coming even from organizations previously uncritical or subtly supportive of the TTP.
It hasn't uniformly been unequivocal, but is welcome nonetheless. At the same time there have been efforts to cloud the issue. Bizarrely, in some public displays Malala's photograph has been juxtaposed with that of
Aafia Siddiqui...American-educated Pak cognitive neuroscientist who was convicted of assault with intent to murder her U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan. In September 2010, she was sentenced to 86 years in jug after a three-ring trial. Siddiqui, using the alias Fahrem or Feriel Shahin, was one of six alleged al-Qaeda members who bought $19 million worth of blood diamonds in Liberia immediately prior to 9-11-01. Since her incarceration Paks have taken her to their heart and periodically erupt into demonstrations, while the government tries to find somebody to swap for her...
. Whatever the latter, now imprisoned in the US, may or may not have done, it requires a fairly perverse leap of the imagination to hint at any parallels.
Perhaps inevitably, the relentless American drone attacks in the Wazoo region have been drawn into the discourse. Indignation over the missile strikes has never been a valid excuse for a softened stance on domestic terrorists. There are plenty of grounds for opposing both, while recognising that the latter pose a considerably broader and longer-term threat.
And, since last week, it is possible at least to understand the emotional charge behind an outburst by one of Malala's former teachers, whom Sami Yousafzai quotes recently as saying: "I was a supporter of ... Imran Khan
... aka
Taliban Khan, who isn't your heaviest-duty thinker, maybe not even among the top five...
. Now I'm challenging Imran Khan: your march against the drone attacks was wrong! Let the US eliminate the Taliban! They are a burden to our civilisation and all humanity!"
It's not as straightforward as that, unfortunately. The Taliban, their obscurantist allies and their primitive mentality can be eliminated only by Paks. By trying to murder a child who symbolises a brighter tomorrow, the forces of darkness have struck a more-or-less nationwide chord.
Whether it proves to be a watershed moment remains to be seen, but if such a shock to the national psyche fails to kickstart a vigorous fightback -- through ideas, as Malala has been doing, not just weapons -- then it's hard to say what will. Pakistain's future is on life support. If those who would murder it are to be stopped, the time is now.