We pray for the recovery of Malala Yousufzai, the 14-year-old braveheart from Mingora in Pakistan’s Swat region, who was shot in the head and neck by the Pakistan Taliban. The terrorist outfit was angered by her campaign for female education on television for the past three years.
Malala also wrote a blog in Urdu for the BBC in which she expressed herself freely about life in Swat after it came under Taliban control with Islamabad watching helplessly.
After the first procedures, the intrepid child was flown in an air ambulance to Birmingham for advanced surgery on Monday. The New Statesman writes that her shooting “has shocked an unshockable Pakistan”. Schoolchildren, citizens’ groups, political parties and even the Pakistan Army have been stunned into disbelief by the Taliban’s insane act and threat that it would shoot Malala again if she survived.
Perhaps an angered nation waits for its political parties, government and the all-powerful Army to put their heads together and develop a plan to fight the Taliban’s medieval ways and its inhuman ideology. But can there be much hope so long as the Pakistan Army treats the Taliban as an ally with whose help it hopes to further its aims in next-door Afghanistan, and also as a military asset in confronting India?
The problem in Pakistan is its structure of power. If the party in khaki isn’t dislodged from politics, the Taliban and others like it will continue to keep Pakistan a social dungeon over which they alone preside.