Malala Drama part 1;The attack on Malala Yousafzai last month has evoked worldwide condemnation. From US President Barack Obama to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, all condemned the attack. The question is: why is Malala given so much prominence when other attacks on girls in Pakistan and Afghanistango virtually unnoticed? The attempt on the life ofMalala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl from Mingora in Pakistan’s Swat Valley on October 9 has arousedworldwide outrage. Two other girls were also injured in the attack as Malala was returning home in a school bus. There were rallies in her support not only in Pakistan but some very high-powered global players also weighed in on her case. In what mustbe a first, US President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Secretary General BanKi-moon and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown all condemned the attack onMalala as did most politicians in Pakistan. Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie suggested Malala should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize while Madonna put Malala’s name on her bare back! Let us get the basic facts straight before we proceed. She was attacked and badly injured when a gunman boarded the school bus she was riding home from school. The gunmandemanded to know who Malala was. When another girl student pointed to her, the gunman opened fire, hitting Malala in the headand neck. The gunman also shot and wounded two other girls before escaping. The badly wounded girl was rushedto Peshawar, capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. After initial treatment at a hospital in Peshawar, Malala was airlifted to the Combined Military Hospital (CMH) in Rawalpindi where Pakistan’s top neurosurgeons treated her. Once her condition stabilized, she was flown to Britain where she is now receiving rehabilitative care at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. Doctors have given a good prognosis of her recoveryand say she will be able to resume normal life after some reconstructivesurgery to her skull. It is impossible not to sympathize with Malala, ayoung girl with large beautiful hazel eyes peering from her innocent face, and her naturally distraught parents. It is shocking that a young girl would be targeted for simply wanting to go to school to acquire education, which is her birthright asit is of millions of other young girls in Pakistan asindeed elsewhere in the world. What kind of beasts would want to harm a young girl doing no more than acquiring education? But who exactly is Malala Yousufzai to attract so much international attention? What about the two other girls that were injured in the same attack? Even their names are not widely known, much less information about their parents. Apart from the fact that they are out of danger, there is little that we know about their plight. Are they not worthy of attention and sympathy? Within days of the assaulton Malala, American troops killed three Afghan children on October 14 in an aerial attack in the Nawa district of Helmand Province in Afghanistan. It may not be adjoining Swat Valley but is not very far either from where Malala was attacked and injured. As is customary, the US military initially described the bombing as a “precision strike,” that was reportedly aimed at several Taliban fighters who were allegedly planting an IED in the road. The attack, however, killed three children. Does anybody know the names of thosethree innocent Afghan children, all members of the same family collecting dung for fuel in the grinding poverty of Afghanistan despite 11years of America’s showering the country with cruise missiles and trillions of dollars in “aid”? For the record, thethree children were Borjan, 12; Sardar Wali, 10; and Khan Bibi, 8 but do not expect Obama, Clinton or any other Western official to rush to the microphone to name these children or condemn the cowardly attack that snuffed the life out of three innocent children. That would not serve America’s “national interest” nor would keeping statistics of the hundreds of children murdered by American drones in Pakistan’s tribal region since 2004. On October 20, American forces killed four more children in Afghanistan. There is no mention of their names; it is safe to assume we will never learn their names. Another batch of Afghan children have been slaughtered for the sake of protecting and projecting “US interests.” On October 12, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani whether her governmentwould now go after the Taliban in North Waziristan? To her credit,Ms. Rabbani pointed out that when the Pakistan army launched its operations in Swat in thesummer of 2009, most of the militants fled to Afghanistan’s Kunar province. They were sheltered there while theUS and its allies keep demanding of us to go after the Taliban and their supporters in Pakistan. One Pakistani general asked in the wake of the Malala attack: are the Taliban from Pakistan really such a threat to US security? The overwhelming majority of Taliban are inside Afghanistan. Why are the US and its allies incapable of dealing withthe problem at its source instead of demanding that Pakistan “do more”? So we come back to the question: Who is Malala Yousufzai and why has she been turned into an international icon? She even has entries on Wikipedia. How many Pakistani students, much less a girl from a remote town in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, have such entries?Is it possible that unknown to her, Malala was being used in a larger US plan by first building her profile, thendeliberately releasing information to make her the target of an attack in order to force the Pakistani military to launch an operation in North Waziristan that theUS has been demanding for months? Not surprisingly, soon after the attack on Malala, callswere heard both within and outside Pakistan to strike at the Taliban in North Waziristan. As HafizHussain Ahmed of the Jamiat-ul Ulama-e Islam asked: what has North Waziristan got to do withMingora, where Malala was attacked unless this is part of a broader plan? One cannot help but draw comparisons between Malala and a pregnant woman in the Bollywood movie Kahaani (Story). The pregnant Indian woman, Mrs. Vidya Bagchi, (played by Vidya Balan) sets out from London to search for her husband who has gone “missing” in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). The movie plot is quite involved but she ends up being used by a ruthless and arrogant intelligence agent namedMr. Khan (played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui). He wants to trap a reneged intelligence officer-turned-killer who murdered 200 passengers on a commuter train using poisonous gas. A young police officer named Rana working for Mr. Khan is taken aback when he realizes what his boss is up to. Mrs. Bagchi is to be used as bait to lure the killer and to ferret out the mole inside the intelligence outfit who is helping the killer. Rana asks Mr. Khan what is the difference betweenthem and the killer if they are both prepared to kill innocent people (in this case, Mrs. Bagchi).Mr. Khan scolds his underling warning him against getting emotionally involved with Mrs. Bagchi and then tells him in a matter of fact manner, “He [the killer] is wrong and we are right because we kill to serve the ‘national interest’.” Is Malala in reallife the equivalent of Mrs.Bagchi of the Bollywood movie? Let us explore thisfurther. Malala was born on July 12, 1997. Her father, Ziauddin Yousufzai, ownsa number of for-profit schools. While almost everything else in Pakistan is going down the drain, for-profit schools and the closely related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) thatare generously financed from abroad are thriving businesses.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 11:14:20 +0000
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