Did the Taliban overplay their hand when their gunmen shot a 14-year-old Pakistani girl simply because she wanted to go to school? We can only hope. Just when you think the militant Islamic Taliban movement can’t sink any lower, you hear another story as deplorable and cowardly as the shooting of Malala Yousafzai. As the world knows by now, Taliban gunmen shot and critically wounded her in a recent assassination attempt as she was coming home from school in Pakistan’s battle-scarred Swat Valley.
Her crime? Public advocacy of education for girls. Questioning the Taliban’s sexist reading of Shariah law, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan organization told the media in an Oct 10 letter that Yousafzai was guilty of leading a “campaign against Islam.”
In fact, she led no such thing, but the Taliban are too fanatical to see the difference. The letter accuses Yousafzai, who gained global fame through an online diary she wrote for the BBC, of being “pro-West,” promoting Western culture and “inviting Muslims to hate mujahedeen,” the Taliban term for holy warriors. In fact, the Taliban, which helped give birth to Al-Qaea next door in Afghanistan, have made it easy for the world to hate the movement. This time, one hopes, the Taliban have gone too far for their own good. Even the usually timid, indifferent and corruption-riddled Pakistani national government has been shaken out of its usual lethargy toward Taliban encroachments in the Swat Valley.
FARIHA SAEED UNSERI
Lahore