Shashank Joshi writes: October of last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Many Asian policymakers will read the lessons of that harrowing episode with some self-satisfaction.

When India and Pakistan conducted their nuclear weapon tests in 1998, foreign analysts repeatedly told them that, as poor countries with weak institutions, they could not be entrusted with such awesome weaponry. Nascent nuclear powers were simply less reliable stewards than their Cold War counterparts. Over a decade on, and multiple crises later — Kargil in 1999, a military standoff in 2001-2, and the Mumbai attacks of 2008 — India and Pakistan have experienced nothing quite as perilous as the Cuban scare.

U.S. officials claim that Pakistan readied nuclear weapons during the Kargil conflict without the knowledge of then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. But, even at the height of their crises neither India nor Pakistan have attempted, as the U.S. did in 1962, anything quite as foolish as depth-charging nuclear-armed submarines or scrambling aircraft equipped with nuclear air-to-air missiles towards hostile airspace. The dawn of Asia’s nuclear age has been calmer than that of Europe, and far calmer than the nuclear alarmists predicted.

But, as Paul Bracken and others have warned, we should not get complacent. When India tested its Agni-V missile in April, I and others raised a number of potential issues: Indian scientists were making cavalier statements of nuclear posture best left to political leaders, and the development of multiple warheads for each missile (known as MIRVs) and missile defense technology could all be destabilizing if not handled extremely carefully. India has legitimate deterrence requirements vis-a-vis China, but it would be counterproductive for this to become an open-ended expansion.

Pakistan’s nuclear trajectory is, however, altogether more worrying.

This issue is usually framed in terms of numbers. Pakistan possesses what is thought to be the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world and if present trends continue, could equal or surpass Britain’s stockpile within a decade. So far, the Western world has viewed this expansion as a nonproliferation issue, not a security one. But, over the longer-term, that could change. As a recent report from the EU Non-Proliferation Consortium noted, “EU members might have military facilities within reach of Pakistani longer-range missiles … or temporary bases and personnel” and, “in the case of a deterioration in Pakistan’s relations with the West, this could be a subject of concern.” Pakistan is free to dismiss European and American anxieties, but this will only reinforce the country’s longer-term isolation.

There is also a second, more serious concern. Pakistan is developing a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons (TNWs) that target not Indian cities, but Indian military formations on the battlefield. The purpose of these, as former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States Maleeha Lodhi explained in November, is “to counterbalance India’s move to bring conventional military offensives to a tactical level.” The idea is that smaller nuclear weapons, used on Pakistani soil, would stop invading Indian forces in their tracks. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Gunmen shot dead six health workers on an anti-polio drive in a string of attacks in Pakistan over 24 hours, officials said on Tuesday, raising fears for the future of efforts to eradicate the crippling disease in one of its last strongholds.

It was not clear who was behind the shootings, but Taliban insurgents have repeatedly denounced the vaccination campaign as a Western plot. The campaign aims to wipe out polio in one of the last three countries where it is endemic.

“Such attacks deprive Pakistan’s most vulnerable population – especially children – of basic life-saving health interventions,” the World Health Organization and the UN Children’s Fund, which are working with the Pakistani government on the campaign, said in a joint statement.

Health officials suspended the campaign in two provinces of Pakistan, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Karachi, the capital of Sindh, is Pakistan’s biggest city and home to 18 million people.

Four people were killed in separate attacks on health workers in Karachi on Tuesday, the UN said. Another health worker was killed in the same city on Monday.

The team had received telephone calls warning workers they would regret helping the “infidel” campaign against polio, health official Gul Naz said.

In the northwestern city of Peshawar, gunmen on a motorbike shot a 17-year-old girl supervising an anti-polio campaign, government official Javed Marwar said.

She died of her wounds in hospital, a doctor said.

All of the victims were Pakistanis who are among the tens of thousands working with a UN-backed program to eradicate polio, a disease which can be prevented but not cured and can cause permanent paralysis within hours of infection.

Pakistan, its neighbour, Afghanistan, and Nigeria are the only three countries where polio is still endemic, and so are key to the campaign to eradicate the disease worldwide. At least 35 children have been infected in Pakistan this year.

There have been at least three other shootings involving polio-eradication workers this year.

Some Islamists and Muslim preachers say the polio vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize Muslims while other religious leaders have taken part in campaigns aimed at debunking that myth.

Accusations that immunization campaigns are cover for spies were given credence when it emerged that the United States had used a Pakistani vaccination team to gather intelligence about Osama bin Laden.

In Karachi, provincial Health Minister Saghir Ahmed said the government had told 24,000 polio workers it was suspending the anti-polio drive in Sindh province.

Owen Bennett-Jones writes: In her posthumously published book, Reconciliation, Benazir Bhutto named a man whom she believed had tried to procure bombs for an unsuccessful attempt on her life in Karachi in October 2007:

I was informed of a meeting that had taken place in Lahore where the bomb blasts were planned … a bomb maker was needed for the bombs. Enter Qari Saifullah Akhtar, a wanted terrorist who had tried to overthrow my second government. He had been extradited by the United Arab Emirates and was languishing in the Karachi central jail … The officials in Lahore had turned to Akhtar for help. His liaison with elements in the government was a radical who was asked to make the bombs and he himself asked for a fatwa making it legitimate to oblige. He got one.

Akhtar’s story reveals much about modern Pakistan. Born in 1959, he spent two years of his boyhood learning the Quran by heart and left home at the age of 18, moving to the radical Jamia Binoria madrassah in Karachi. In 1980, he went on jihad, fighting first the Soviets in Afghanistan and later the Indians in Kashmir. In both conflicts he came into contact with Pakistani intelligence agents, who were there trying to find out what was going on and to influence events. Helped by the high attrition rate among jihadis, he rose through the ranks and by the mid-1990s, after an intense power struggle with a rival commander, emerged as the leader of Harkat ul Jihad al Islami or HUJI, once described by a liberal Pakistan weekly as ‘the biggest jihadi outfit we know nothing about’.

In 1995, Akhtar committed a crime that in many countries would have earned him a death sentence: he procured a cache of weapons to be used in a coup. Putsches in Pakistan generally take the form of the army chief moving against an elected government. This one was an attempt by disaffected Islamist officers to overthrow not only Bhutto’s government but also the army leadership.

The plot’s leader was Major General Zahir ul Islam Abbasi. In 1988, as Pakistan’s military attaché in Delhi, he acquired some sensitive security documents from an Indian contact. When the Indians found out, they beat him up and expelled him. He returned to Pakistan a national hero. Seven years later, disenchanted by the secularist tendencies of both Bhutto and the army leadership, he devised a plot to storm the GHQ and impose sharia. Akhtar’s role was to supply the weapons. He travelled to the town of Dera Adam Khel near Peshawar, a well-known centre for the production and sale of cheap weapons, and bought 15 Kalashnikovs, two rocket launchers and five pistols.

He was caught red-handed moving the weapons to Rawalpindi. No doubt cajoled by his intelligence agency handlers from Afghanistan and Kashmir, Akhtar decided to give evidence against his fellow plotters. At a stroke he was transformed from a typical jihadi into a highly trusted informant; he has been playing on his supposed loyalty to the intelligence services ever since. Many of those accused of major jihadi outrages in Pakistan have at some stage been released from detention; after Akhtar had spent just five months in prison in 1995, the chief justice set him free.

It is commonplace for the Pakistani intelligence agencies to cut deals with jihadis. In Akhtar they struck gold. While most Pakistanis never escape the class into which they are born, radical Islamists enjoy considerable social mobility. He had left his Karachi seminary in 1979 with a dream of fighting jihad; by the mid-1990s he was the leader of the HUJI and had a close relationship with Mullah Omar, the Afghan Taliban leader and de facto head of state. Indeed, he was seen as one of the few people who might have been able to bridge the growing gap between the Taliban and al-Qaida. Not only that, he expanded the HUJI’s operations to Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Burma, China and Chechnya.

Everything changed with the collapse of the Taliban regime after 9/11. According to one account, Akhtar and Mullah Omar shared the same motorbike as they fled for sanctuary with Akhtar’s old intelligence contacts in Pakistan. He told his men to keep a low profile – the US was picking up jihadis and sending them to Guantánamo – and himself headed to the UAE, a hub for Islamists as well as Western businessmen. By 2004 he had overstretched even the UAE’s relaxed hospitality. He was arrested on charges of plotting the assassination attempt on General Musharraf in December 2003 and handed over to Pakistan.

One might think that this time his luck had run out. But that would be to misapprehend the convoluted logic of what has been described as the ‘deep state’ in Pakistan. Akhtar, and others like him, were seen not as a clear and present threat, but as powerful, not very well educated men who simply needed to be pointed in the right direction. If they could be persuaded to aim their guns not at domestic targets but at the Americans in Afghanistan or at India they could still be useful. [Continue reading…]

Beenish Ahmed writes: Outside a downtown Islamabad coffee shop that sells an assortment of French macaroons (cupcakes are so passé), I strike up a conversation with Omar Malik.

A 34-year-old who works for a private telecommunications company, Malik seems liberal. Liberal in the way Americans stumbling through Muslim-majority countries might find comforting.

He’s dressed smartly in a collared shirt—with only the appropriate number of buttons unbuttoned. He sips a latte and speaks in flawless, albeit slightly accented, English.

When it comes to American politics, though, he isn’t technically “liberal” —at least as far as U.S. political categories go.

“Republicans have historically always been better for Pakistan than Democrats,” Malik says matter-of-factly. “In terms of the relations that we have had, I think Bush was a much better president than Obama or Clinton was.”

He leans back in his lawn chair when I inquire further. This is not what I expected to hear from a man outside a posh cafe on a Saturday night, but he continues, “In terms of foreign policy, in terms of [not] giving preference to India over Pakistan, the Republicans have been much more balanced,” Malik says.

I remind him of how, when pressed during the presidential debate on foreign policy, Mitt Romney said he’d continue President Obama’s policy of using drones to target terrorist enclaves in Pakistan.

But Malik is resolute. He chalks Romney’s assertion up to campaign rhetoric. The sort of tough-on-terror talk, he says knowingly, that Obama also ran on four years ago.

Pakistan has long been seen by American analysts as a “wildcard” state—a sort of trick card that either appears as a Queen of Hearts or a Joker depending on when, and for how long, you look.

It’s a trick ordinary Pakistanis—who would probably just as readily fill the streets to protest America as they would to claim a visa if the United States decided to offer up them up for free—can play just as well. Nearly three-fourths of Pakistanis polled said they see the United States as an “enemy.” That’s up from 64 percent just three years ago.

As if to say “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” another recent poll found that 43 percent of Pakistanis claimed they should have the right to vote in U.S. elections, a number topped only by people in Kenya, China, India, and Cameroon.

“Pakistanis should be given the right to vote,” says Rahat Khan, a 27-year-old who manages supply orders at a construction company in Islamabad. He adds completely earnestly, “After all, all of the decisions made about Pakistan are made in America.” [Continue reading…]

Mohammed Hanif writes: Apparently, Pakistanis don’t need the Taliban to destroy their schools any more – they can do it themselves. Last week, a girls’ high school was set ablaze in Pakistan’s second largest city, Lahore. And no, the Taliban were not the culprits. A mob, enraged after allegations of blasphemy against a teacher, carried out the attack. Instead of taking action against them, the police arrested the school’s 77-year-old owner.

The accused teacher, who allegedly committed blasphemy by photocopying the wrong page of a book for homework, is in hiding. Pakistan may have declared an “education emergency” earlier this year, but it still fails to protect the schools it already has. How did we get here?

“They have shut down girls’ schools,” I told a childhood friend who was effusively praising the Pakistani Taliban after its temporary takeover of the Swat valley three years ago. Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani peace activist shot last month by the Taliban, was a bored 11-year-old schoolgirl then. My friend lived about 350 miles away from Swat, and had three daughters. His reasons for liking the Taliban were simple: they were local heroes who had decided to take things into their own hands. “If only people in our area had the same courage,” he said. “Would you like a Taliban-type system here in your city?” I asked him. Yes, of course, he would.

Every morning, my friend drove two of his daughters to school and was pretty certain that one of them would go to medical school. “But the Taliban don’t allow girls’ education. What will happen when they shut down your daughters’ school?” I asked. My friend was puzzled, but only for a moment. “They wouldn’t do that here. What they did in Swat is their culture, Pashtun culture.”

Not educating girls is not the only myth about Pashtuns: Pashtun mothers produce sons so that they can send them to war; fathers will shoot their daughters if a stranger sees their faces. Of course, as the myth goes, they also don’t want to send their daughters to schools. And why do they need to send their sons to school anyway, if they are born soldiers in an eternal jihad?

But there was no evidence of any such Pashtun culture in the Swat valley I had visited the day before our conversation. When the Taliban made their bid to rule the region, Swat could have easily passed as the education capital of Pakistan. There were law schools, medical schools, nursing schools and more computer schools than any other valley of this size could accommodate. And that’s without counting the hundreds of informal beauty schools that provide on-the-job training for girls so poor they can’t afford any other type of education.

A lot of Pakistanis, as well as people the world over, have expressed their solidarity with Malala by doing the obligatory status update or tweet: “We are all Malala”. But for most people, she is someone else’s child and will remain so. She is a child whose name can be invoked to start another military operation, a child whose name can be used to prove the blindingly obvious – that parents, whatever their religion or culture, would like their children to be at school – if they can afford it.

What is conveniently ignored in the debate over Malala is the fact that every 10th child in the world who doesn’t go to school is Pakistani. The Taliban are not the only ones keeping kids out of school. [Continue reading…]

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: For advocacy to be successful, it has to come from a place of empathy rather than superiority. Many of the most vocal advocates of women’s rights in Pakistan today are also known for their sanguine views on the “war on terror.” It is, therefore, doubtful that their new self-image as the deliverers of women from patriarchal tyranny will gain much purchase among the sufferers.

Women have doubtless borne the brunt of the dislocation and insecurity occasioned by the “war on terror.” But, to treat women’s rights in isolation from the general malaise merely serves to put the concern under a pall of suspicion. This is because women’s rights have been long used as a pretext for imperial aggression. Far from bringing relief, their invocation—especially by the apologists for war—merely helps obscurantist criminals, like the TTP, elevate misogyny to anti-imperial expression.

The situation in Pakistan’s troubled northwest is no doubt ugly. From the indiscriminate violence of the Taliban, the gratuitous butchery of sectarian criminals, the bombing of girls’ schools, the targeting of children, to the threats against the media, it is a predicament that is begging for a visionary political solution.

The Pakistani government, it seems however, will not provide that. Under pressure from foreign allies and cheered on by home-grown pugilists, the government has repeatedly opted for half-hearted military solutions which, given its limited resources and ill-defined goals, inevitably descend into collective punishment and extra-judicial killing. The confused and often indiscriminate nature of these operations has swelled the ranks of the very enemy the state is out to destroy. If war for Clausewitz was politics by other means; in Pakistan, it has become a substitute for politics. [Continue reading…]

The Associated Press reports: Despite widespread outrage over the Taliban shooting of a female teenage activist, Pakistani leaders and opinion makers are divided over whether the government should respond by targeting the militants’ last major sanctuary along the Afghan border.

The U.S. has long pressed Pakistan to launch an operation in the remote and mountainous North Waziristan tribal area, home to enemies of Islamabad as well as to militants fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The recent attack on 14-year-old Malala Yousufzai has given new momentum to the debate.

One side argues the government should harness anger over the shooting to build public support for a push into North Waziristan. The other claims more fighting isn’t the answer and would trigger a violent backlash. They recommend peace negotiations and ending Pakistani support for the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

The Associated Press of Pakistan adds: The Foreign Office (FO) spokesperson said on Thursday that it was unfortunate that the attack on Malala Yousafzai was being used to justify the launch of a military operation in North Waziristan.

During a weekly briefing, FO spokesperson Moazzam Ali Khan condemned the attack on the 14-year-old child rights activist and said that it could not be justified in any manner.

Reuters reports: The alleged organiser of the Taliban shooting of a Pakistani schoolgirl was captured during a 2009 military offensive against the hard-line Islamist group but released after three months, two senior officials told Reuters.

They identified the man who planned the attack on 14-year-old Malala Yousufzai only as Attaullah, and said he was one of the two gunmen who shot her on a school bus this month in the Swat Valley, northwest of Islamabad.

Believed to be in his 30s, Attaullah is on the run and may have fled to neighbouring Afghanistan, they said. He organised the attack on the orders of one of the Taliban’s most feared commanders, Maulana Fazlullah, officials said.

Critics say Pakistan’s low conviction rate of militants, even high-profile ones who carried out major attacks, is one reason why extremism has spread in the South Asian nation.

Sami Yousafzai reports: Malala Yousafzai has taken one more step in her very long and difficult journey. Separated from her family for now, the 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl arrived today at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Britain’s primary receiving facility for military casualties returning from overseas. Doctors say she still has not regained consciousness since being shot in the head by a Pakistani Taliban gunman who forced his way into a van full of schoolgirls, asked for her by name, and opened fire.

The attack has provoked unprecedented levels of public outrage, both in Pakistan and Afghanistan—even among people who have in the past sympathized with the militants. “First of all, attempting to kill a 14-year-old girl is a low act,” says Mullah Yahya, who was a high-ranking Afghan Information Ministry official back in the 1990s, when Mullah Mohammed Omar’s regime was in power. “Second, claiming responsibility for it is a sign that the [Pakistani] Taliban are not aware of the media’s importance. I have seen more anger against the religious elements in the past week than in all my 40 years of life.” Pakistan’s interior minister, Rehman Malik, says the government has posted a $1 million bounty on Ehsanullah Ehsan, the Pakistani Taliban spokesman who claimed responsibility for the shooting.

So how are the Pakistani Taliban responding to so much public condemnation? By declaring war on individual journalists and the media, of course. “For days and days, coverage of the Malala case has shown clearly that the Pakistani and international media are biased,” says a Pakistani Taliban commander in South Waziristan. “The Taliban cannot tolerate biased media.” The commander, who calls himself Jihad Yar, argues that death threats against the press are justified: he says “99 percent” of the reporters on the story are only using the shooting as an excuse to attack the Taliban. [Continue reading…]

In an open letter to Imran Khan, who many have come to regard as the leading light in Pakistani politics, Fahd Husain writes:

The moment you and your supporters say “we condemn the attack on Malala and also those who shot her, but…”, the moment this “but” enters the rationale, the duplicity of thought, the ambiguity of intent, the ambivalence of attitude and the confusion, yes confusion of vision bubbles to the surface like a toxic pollutant.

Why is that so bad? You ask. Are the lives of those killed by drones cheaper than Malala’s? Are they children of a lesser god?

No they are not, Mr Khan. All lives are equally precious. But that is not the point. The drones versus Malala debate – that unfortunately your party leadership and its followers have triggered – is no debate. It is not an ‘either or’ issue. Both are wrong.

So why this useless debate then? Here’s where, Mr Khan, I blame you. Why? Because you are the fountain from which your followers drink their political nectar. They parrot you (often nauseatingly on social media), they regurgitate your arguments and they peddle your logic. Your party leadership pushes your line on TV and defends your rationale on public forums.

In the last week or so, they have fallen flat on their faces. The reason: your ideas are not fully fleshed out. Some call it intellectual dishonesty. I prefer to call it intellectual laziness.

You cannot bring yourself to condemn the Pakistani Taliban like you condemn say, Asif Zardari or Nawaz Sharif. Fine. I do not have a problem as long as you have a certain credible logic for it, like you do for your attacks on Zardari and Sharif. But you don’t.

Is it so because, a) Pakistani Taliban are our people, who are misguided and can be reformed? b) They have killed forty thousand other Pakistanis because we are fighting America’s war and so they do, err… kind of, have a point? c) If the drones would stop, they would stop attacking Malalas and Kainats and Shazias, and stop dynamiting girls’ schools and stop demanding their version of the Sharia for the entire Pakistani society? Or Mr Khan, is it what you have said in your Economist interview, that if you condemn them who will protect your party workers from them?

The last one has left me at a loss of words. Are you saying, Mr Khan, that you will not condemn them, not out of conviction and power of logic, but because of – horror of horrors – fear?

I can be fearful. Your supporters can be fearful. Even your detractors can be fearful. But none of us, Mr Khan, are claiming the leadership of this country; a bold and courageous leadership, I may add.

I, Mr Khan, am the proud father of seven-year old twin daughters. When I look at Malala lying on that stretcher, and I visualise the faces of my daughters, my eyes well up. The pictures of little babies killed and injured by drone attacks bring a lump in my throat. They are all our children. Not one or the other, but all. [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: The 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by Taliban gunmen is being flown to the UK for medical treatment.

Malala Yousafzai has until now been at a military hospital in Rawalpindi, with doctors saying her progress over the next few days would be “critical”.

She remains in a serious condition after the attack, which the Taliban said they carried out because she was “promoting secularism”.

Pakistan’s interior minister has said the attack was planned abroad.

Those involved would soon be caught, said Rehman Malik, without giving further details.

Malala left Pakistan on board an air ambulance provided by the United Arab Emirates, accompanied by a full medical team.

It was not immediately clear whether any of her family were travelling with her.

She is being taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham – an NHS (National Health Service) hospital which has a specialist major trauma centre.

The cost of her care and rehabilitation is being funded by Pakistan.

The Express Tribune reports: Incensed by the attack on teenage child activist Malal Yousafzai, a local jirga has declared war on Taliban until the elimination of militancy from the picturesque valley.

The valley wriggled out of the clutches of Taliban following the 2009 military operation against notorious militant commander Mullah Fazlullah aka Mullah Radio who claimed responsibility for the attack on Malala.

“The attack on Malala Yousafzai and other girls was a cowardly act which should be condemned on every platform,” Saifullah Khan, the chairperson of the Nepkikhel Aman Jirga, told a news conference at Swat Press Club on Saturday.

“The attack shows that even children are not safe from the evils of terrorists. But we clearly extend our message to anti-Pakistan elements that such cowardly acts will not deter us from fighting against terrorism,” he said.

Khan added that the Nepkikhel Aman Jirga had stood firm in the battle against terrorism. “We invite the entire nation to stand with us against terrorists. We have made countless sacrifices for the restoration of peace and we are ready to render more for maintaining peace in our region,” he said.

Criticising the attack on schoolchildren, Khan said if the Taliban were bold enough, they should dare to come out of their hiding holes and fight.

“It is not bravery to attack innocent children. They are only defaming Islam, Pakistan and our nation in the name of their own version of Islam,” he said.

At Open Democracy, Meredith Tax writes: The US antiwar group Code Pink, which describes itself as “a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end US funded wars and occupations,” recently sent a delegation to Pakistsan to campaign against drones with Imran Khan. On October 9th, a dozen of them held a symbolic twelve hour fast outside the Islamabad Press Club, holding “pictures of the more than 160 Pakistani children who have been killed by American drones.”

The same day, in nearby Swat, another Pakistani child, 14 year old Malala Yousafzai, was gunned down by the Pakistani Taliban because she was an advocate of education for girls. They stopped her school bus, asked for her by name, and shot her twice in the head, wounding two other students in the process

No turn of events could more forcefully illustrate the idiocy of the US peace movement’s one-sided approach to solidarity. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: One of the Taliban’s most feared commanders, Maulana Fazlullah, carefully briefed two killers from his special hit squad on their next target.

The gunmen weren’t going after any army officer, politician or Western diplomat. Their target was a 14-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl who had angered the Taliban by speaking out for “Western”-style girls’ education.

Tuesday’s shooting of Malala Yousufzai was the culmination of years of campaigning that had pitted the fearless, smiling young girl against one of Pakistan’s most ruthless Taliban commanders.

Their story began in 2009, when Fazlullah, known as Radio Mullah for his fiery radio broadcasts, took over Swat Valley, and ordered the closure of girls’ schools, including Yousufzai’s.

Outraged, the then-11-year-old kept a blog for the BBC under a pen name and later launched a campaign for girls’ education. It won her Pakistan’s highest civilian honor and death threats from the Taliban.

Yousufzai was not blind to the dangers. In her hometown of Mingora, Fazlullah’s Taliban fighters dumped bodies near where her family lived.

“I heard my father talking about another three bodies lying at Green Chowk,” she wrote in her diary, referring to a nearby roundabout.

A military offensive pushed Fazlullah out of Swat in 2009, but his men simply melted away across the border to Afghanistan. Earlier this year, they kidnapped and beheaded 17 Pakistani soldiers in one of several cross border raids.

Yousufzai continued speaking out despite the danger. As her fame grew, Fazlullah tried everything he could to silence her. The Taliban published death threats in the newspapers and slipped them under her door. But she ignored them.

The Taliban say that’s why they sent assassins, despite a tribal code forbidding the killing of women.

“We had no intentions to kill her but were forced when she would not stop (speaking against us),” said Sirajuddin Ahmad, a spokesman of Swat Taliban now based in Afghanistan’s Kunar province.

He said the Taliban held a meeting a few months ago at which they unanimously agreed to kill her. The task was then given to military commanders to carry out.

The militia has a force of around 100 men specialized in targeted killing, fighters said. They chose two men, aged between 20-30, who were locals from Swat Valley.

The gunmen had proved their worth in previous assassinations, killing an opposition politician and attacking a leading hotelier for “obscenity” in promoting tourism.

Their trademark is to kill by shots to the head.

Such hits, although dangerous, are also a badge of honor among the Taliban. The fighters who carry them out often receive personal calls of congratulations from senior leaders and may also get cash or guns.

Now it was Yousufzai’s turn. [Continue reading…]

Time reports: A larger battlefield in Pakistan looms for the group that claims responsibility for shooting Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old advocate of education for girls. Even as the young woman lay in critical condition, with “a 70% chance of survival” according to one local newspaper, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) vowed it would attack her again if she survives, according to a statement from their spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan. Indeed, for the TTP, the stakes are broader than schooling for girls and women. “If anyone thinks that Malala is targeted because of education,” said a TTP statement, “that’s absolutely wrong and propaganda by the media. Malala is targeted because of her pioneer role in preaching secularism and so-called enlightened moderation. And whosoever will commit so in the future too will be targeted again by TTP.”

The Taliban may have been making a political play with the shooting. After all, Pakistanis, in the recent past, have reacted ambivalently to violence against representatives of “secularism and so-called enlightened moderation.” Last year, the then governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, was assassinated by one of his own security guards — Mumtaz Qadri — who was incensed over his boss’ support of a Christian woman who was facing charges of blasphemy, a legal charge in the eyes of Pakistani law. The assassination left Pakistan divided between “liberals” thoroughly opposed to the murder and crowds — including lawyers — who thronged the streets to throw rose petals on the vehicle that transported Qadri to court.

Later that same year, Federal Minister for Minorities Shahbaz Bhatti — himself a Christian — was assassinated in Islamabad when Taliban gunmen opened fire on his car. The murderers left the scene with pamphlets that labeled the minister a “Christian infidel.” Bhatti — like Taseer — had spoken out against the blasphemy laws.

In July, Farida Afridi, 25, the founder of a nonprofit that educated Pakistani women about their legal rights, was gunned down in broad daylight in Peshawar, a Taliban stronghold. She was shot in the head, reportedly, after a motorbike with two men drove up behind her, opened fire and sped away. No one has claimed responsibility for her death. “How do you hold assassins accountable when your code of ethics is directly in conflict?” asks Hira Nabi, a Lahore artist, exasperated by the country’s ideological divide. “How do you combat a way of existence that doesn’t recognize your right to live?” [Continue reading…]

Dawn reports: At least 50 Islamic scholars belonging to ‘Sunni Ittehad Council’ on Thursday declared Taliban’s attack on Pakistani children’s rights activist Malala Yousafzai as un-Islamic, DawnNews reported.

Sunni Ittehad Council represents ‘Barelvi’ sect of Islam which is influenced by Sufism and defends the traditional Sufi practices from the criticisms of Islamic movements like the ‘Deobandi’, ‘Wahhabi’ and ‘Ahl al-Hadith’.

The scholars issued a combined ‘fatwa’ (Islamic ruling) in Lahore which said that the Taliban’s interpretation of Islam was incorrect and was deviant from the actual interpretation of the Shariah.

The fatwa added that Taliban were misguided and their mindset was driven by ignorance.

“Islam does not stop women from acquiring education and by attacking Malala the Taliban have crossed the limits of Islam,” the fatwa added.

“Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) had regarded the sanctity of Muslim’s life and property more important than the sanctity of the ‘Kaaba’ (sacred Muslim place),” adding that the fatwa stated, “Murder of one innocent human being is equivalent to murder of entire humanity.”

The Islamic ruling added that United States was the enemy of Islam and Pakistan; any kind of cooperation with the US was not in compliance with the Shariah.

If this fatwa makes the Sunni Ittehad Council seem somewhat progressive, it’s worth remembering that last year the same group led demonstrations in support of the self-confessed assassin of former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer. The Pakistani politician’s grave ‘offense’ was that he opposed Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Perhaps this latest fatwa is an indication that the group wants to put in a new application for another grant from the U.S. State Department.