Pakistan has united in revulsion over a Taliban attack on a schoolgirl, but few analysts believe anything will change in a country that has exploited Islamist extremism as an instrument of state policy.
Fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai remains in a critical condition in the country’s top military hospital three days after she was shot, as politicians, school children, Muslims and Christians pray for her recovery.
Pakistan is largely inured to horrific acts of violence. Mosques have been attacked. Ordinary people are slaughtered by suicide bombers. There are sectarian murders and political killings, and thousands of soldiers have died. But the plight of an exceptional young girl who won international recognition for campaigning for the right to an education has sickened millions. Activists say the shooting should be a wake-up call to those who advocate appeasement or peace with the Taliban, but analysts say that would require a seismic shift in a country that has sponsored radical Islam for decades.
Columnist Ayaz Amir called it the “culmination of years of playing with fire and manufacturing demons and Frankensteins (that) we should have had sense enough to understand would come to haunt us and become our worst nightmares”. Some compare the shooting to a video of a 17-year-old girl being flogged, which contributed to unprecedented public support for the military operation that crushed a two-year Taliban insurgency in the Swat valley in 2009. But few expect a comprehensive operation in North Waziristan, the entrenched bastion of the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, which some in Pakistani officialdom consider an asset for future influence in Afghanistan.ISLAMABAD
AFP
Pakistan has united in revulsion over a Taliban attack on a schoolgirl, but few analysts believe anything will change in a country that has exploited Islamist extremism as an instrument of state policy.
Fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai remains in a critical condition in the country’s top military hospital three days after she was shot, as politicians, school children, Muslims and Christians pray for her recovery.
Pakistan is largely inured to horrific acts of violence. Mosques have been attacked. Ordinary people are slaughtered by suicide bombers. There are sectarian murders and political killings, and thousands of soldiers have died. But the plight of an exceptional young girl who won international recognition for campaigning for the right to an education has sickened millions. Activists say the shooting should be a wake-up call to those who advocate appeasement or peace with the Taliban, but analysts say that would require a seismic shift in a country that has sponsored radical Islam for decades.
Columnist Ayaz Amir called it the “culmination of years of playing with fire and manufacturing demons and Frankensteins (that) we should have had sense enough to understand would come to haunt us and become our worst nightmares”. Some compare the shooting to a video of a 17-year-old girl being flogged, which contributed to unprecedented public support for the military operation that crushed a two-year Taliban insurgency in the Swat valley in 2009. But few expect a comprehensive operation in North Waziristan, the entrenched bastion of the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, which some in Pakistani officialdom consider an asset for future influence in Afghanistan.