Rob Creely writes: Few in Pakistan dare to stand up to the home-grown thugs and gangsters of the Taliban. When they extended their reign of terror through the Swat Valley in 2007 and 2008 what did the government and military do? They signed a ceasefire allowing the extremist cleric Maulana Fazlullah a free hand to continue his campaign of beheadings and intimidation.

Malala Yousufzai was one of the few brave voices who spoke out. She did it anonymously – to do otherwise would have brought immediate death. But her blog for the BBC Urdu Service detailing the abuses meant no one could pretend an accommodation with the terrorists was anything other than a deal with the devil.

Now she lies in a hospital bed in a critical condition after being shot by the Pakistan Taliban. So serious are her injuries that a 737 remains on standby ready to fly her to Dubai once she is well enough to be moved.

Malala is not the first campaigner to be singled out for assassination by the Taliban thugs. Commanders of anti-Taliban militias, women’s rights campaigners, anyone who has suggested reform of the draconian blasphemy laws risks death. Pakistan is long hardened to vicious, senseless killings. Few raise more than a murmur, such is the wearying nature of Pakistan bloody list of the dead. (Unless America can be blamed, in which case there will be an orchestrated outcry.)

This time, though, even Pakistan is shocked.

Declan Walsh reports: At the age of 11, Malala Yousafzai took on the Taliban by giving voice to her dreams. As turbaned fighters swept through her town in northwestern Pakistan in 2009, the tiny schoolgirl spoke out about her passion for education — she wanted to become a doctor, she said — and became a symbol of defiance against Taliban subjugation.

On Tuesday, masked Taliban gunmen answered Ms. Yousafzai’s courage with bullets, singling out the 14-year-old on a bus filled with terrified schoolchildren, then shooting her in the head. Two other girls were also wounded in the attack.

All three survived, but on Wednesday a neurologist said Ms. Yousafzai was in critical condition at a hospital in Peshawar, though doctors had been able to remove a bullet. A government official in Peshawar, speaking on condition of anonymity, said arrangements had been made to send Ms. Yousafzai abroad for treatment, but that doctors had said she should not be moved for now. The two other wounded girls were reported to be in stable condition.

A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone Tuesday that Ms. Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an “obscenity.” [Continue reading…]

Malala Yousufzai

The Telegraph reports: A 14-year-old Pakistani girl who campaigned to promote education and expose extremist brutality has been shot in the head by gunmen from the Pakistani Taliban in a retaliatory attack.

Malala Yousafzai was on her way home from school in the former militant stronghold of Swat when two men opened fire, shooting her in the forehead and injuring two other girls.

Witnesses said a bearded man had asked for the girl by name before opening fire.

Her work earned her international recognition and numerous peace awards after she was revealed as the brave seventh grader who wrote an anonymous blog for the BBC’s Urdu service when the Taliban controlled Swat in 2009.

But it also brought death threats.

On Tuesday, a spokesman for the Pakistan Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, accusing her of promoting Western, secular values.

“This was a new chapter of obscenity, and we have to finish this chapter,” he said. “We have carried out this attack.”

Reuters adds: Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said his group was behind the shooting.

“She was pro-West, she was speaking against Taliban and she was calling President Obama her ideal leader,” Ehsan said by telephone from an undisclosed location.

“She was young but she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas,” he said, referring to the main ethnic group in northwest Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. Most members of the Taliban come from conservative Pashtun tribes.

The Express Tribune reports: The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) which attacked National Award Peace winner Malala Yousafzai on Tuesday have said that they will target her again if she survives because she was a “secular-minded lady”.

A TTP spokesperson told The Express Tribune that this was a warning for all youngsters who were involved in similar activites and added that they will be targeted if they do not stop.

Channel Four News aired this report:

Adam Ellick at the New York Times interviewed Malala extensively in a 2009 documentary that was rebroadcast on Al Jazeera:

Ellick writes: The Malala I know transformed with age, from an obedient, rather shy girl 11-year-old into a publicly fearless teenager consumed with taking her activism to new heights. Her father’s personal crusade to restore female education seemed contagious. He is a poet, a school owner and an unflinching educational activist. Ziauddin is truly one of most inspiring and loving people I’ve ever met, and my heart aches for him today. He adores his two sons, but he often referred to Malala as something entirely special. When he sent the boys to bed, Malala was permitted to sit with us as we talked about life and politics deep into the night.

After the film was seen, Malala became even more emboldened. She hosted foreign diplomats in Swat, held press conferences on peace and education, and as a result, she won a host of peace awards. Her best work, however, was that she kept going to school.

In the documentary, and on the surface, Malala comes across as a steady and calming force, undeterred by anxiety or risk. She is mature beyond her years. She never displayed a mood swing, and never complained about my laborious and redundant interviews.

Dawn reports: A Pakistani federal minister has announced a bounty of $100,000 on the maker of the American film “Innocence of Muslims” disrespecting the Holy Prophet (PBUH), DawnNews reported.

Speaking here at a press conference on Saturday, the Federal Minister for Railways Ghulam Ahmed Bilour said that he was aware that it was a crime to instigate the people for murder, but he was ready to commit the crime. He added that there was no way to instill fear among blasphemers other than taking this step.

The minister also called on members of the Taliban and al Qaeda for their support, saying that if members of the banned militant organisations kill the maker of the blasphemous movie, they will also be rewarded.

Tom Hundley writes: One of the more tenacious conspiracy theories that have taken root in the hothouse of Pakistan’s capital is that Osama bin Laden was not killed in the May 2, 2011, Navy SEAL raid on his compound in Abbottabad — that, in fact, he had already been dead for years, killed in the caves of Tora Bora.

According to this theory, the CIA had been keeping bin Laden’s corpse on ice, literally, ready to be resurrected at a moment when his “death” could better serve U.S. interests. That moment came when the SEALs decided to conduct a dry run of their long-planned operation to snatch Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Bin Laden’s thawing corpse was brought along as cover in case the exercise blew up — and as a devious bit of political theater to besmirch Pakistan’s reputation if all went well.

What keep conspiracy theories like this alive are bits and pieces of half-baked evidence that could be construed to support a deeply held belief. In this case, it is the belief — accepted across the board in Pakistan, from the top brass of its military down to the dusty gaggle of taxi drivers who awaited me each morning outside my Islamabad hotel — that the United States has a not-so-secret plan to snatch Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

The United States, which is duly concerned that Pakistan’s nukes could fall into the wrong hands, almost certainly does have a plan to neutralize those weapons in the event of a coup or total state collapse. When the question was put to Condoleezza Rice during her 2005 confirmation hearings to become secretary of state, she replied, “We have noted this problem, and we are prepared to try to deal with it.”

“Try” is the key word. Military experts — American, Pakistani, and Indian — agree that grabbing or disarming all of Pakistan’s nukes at this stage would be something close to mission impossible. As one senior Pakistani general told me, “We look at the stories in the U.S. media about taking away our nuclear weapons and this definitely concerns us, so countermeasures have been developed accordingly.” Such steps have included building more warheads and spreading them out over a larger number of heavily guarded locations. This, of course, also makes the logistics of securing them against theft by homegrown terrorists that much more complicated.

Fears of that terrifying possibility were heightened in August, when a group of militants assaulted a Pakistani base that some believe houses nuclear weapons components. Nine militants and one soldier were killed in a two-hour firefight at the Kamra air force base. The local media immediately floated the theory that this, too, was part of the American plot to steal Pakistan’s nukes. But more disturbing than any conspiracy theory is the reality that this was the fourth attack in five years on the Kamra base, just 20 miles from the capital. At least five other sensitive military installations have also come under attack by militants since 2007.

Yet, though the danger of a loose Pakistani nuke certainly deserves scrupulous attention, it may not be the severest nuclear threat emanating from South Asia, as I came to realize after interviewing more than a dozen experts in Pakistan, India, and the United States this summer. Since the 9/11 attacks, preventing the world’s most dangerous weapons from falling into the hands of the world’s most dangerous actors — whether al Qaeda terrorists or Iranian mullahs — has understandably been America’s stated priority. Yet the gravest danger — not only for the region, but for the United States itself — may be the South Asian incarnation of a Cold War phenomenon: a nuclear arms race.

Pakistan, with an estimated 90 to 120 warheads, is now believed to be churning out more plutonium than any other country on the planet — thanks to two Chinese-built reactors that are now online, a third that is undergoing trials, and a fourth that is scheduled to become operational by 2016. It has already passed India in total number of warheads and is on course to overtake Britain as the world’s No. 5 nuclear power. Pakistan could end up in third place, behind Russia and the United States, within a decade. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: A Pakistani judge on Friday granted bail to a teenage Christian girl accused of burning a religious textbook, offering a potential breakthrough in a prominent case that has renewed scrutiny of the country’s blasphemy laws.

After a lengthy court hearing that saw heated arguments, Justice Muhammad Azam Khan ordered that 14-year-old Rimsha Masih be released on bail of one million rupees, or $10,500.

William Dalrymple writes: It is rare these days to read any good news coming out of Pakistan. It is rarer still to read good news concerning matters of religion. However, in one week two stories seem to show that Pakistan is for once bringing the force of law to bear on those who abuse religion to provoke violence against minorities.

Last Sunday Mohammed Khalid Chisti, the mullah who had accused a 14-year-old Christian girl, Rimsha Masih, of blasphemy, was himself arrested and charged with the same law. The turnaround took place after the muezzin of his mosque gave evidence that he had framed the girl and falsified evidence. More remarkable still, the far-from- moderate All Pakistan Ulema Council came to Rimsha’s defence, calling her “a daughter of the nation” and denouncing Chisthi: “Our heads are bowed with shame for what he did.”

On Tuesday an even more unexpected event took place. Malik Ishaq, the leader of the banned Sunni terrorist group Lashkar–e-Jhangvi, which is accused of killing hundreds of Shias, was arrested on his return from a fund-raising trip to Saudi Arabia. Lashkar operates quite openly in Lahore despite being officially banned; yet on this occasion Ishaq was immediately brought to court. There he was accused of involvement in more than 40 cases in which 70 people have been killed. He now resides in Kot Lakhpat jail on 14-day judicial remand.

When Pakistan was created in 1947 as a homeland for Indian Muslims, its clean-shaven, tweed-jacketed, spats-wearing and pork-eating founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, made sure the constitution of his new country provided the right for all its citizens to profess, practise and propagate their religion: “You may belong to any religion, caste or creed,” he said in his first address to the constituent assembly of Pakistan on August 11 1947. “That has nothing to do with the business of the state. In due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims – not in a religious sense, for that is the personal faith of an individual – but in the political sense as citizens of one state.”

It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who started the rot. In 1974 he bowed to pressure from the religious right and had the country’s small Ahmedi minority declared non-Muslim. The situation became worse still in the 1980s with the military coup of General Zia. Zia was responsible for initiating the fatal alliance between the conservative military and the equally reactionary mullahs that led to the use of Islamic radicals as part of state policy. At the same time Zia started tinkering with the law. He introduced the Islamic punishment of amputation for theft, and established the Hudood ordinances of sharia law, which asserted that the evidence of one man was equal to that of two women, and made any sex outside marriage a punishable offence for women. Rape was to be punished with the public flogging of the female victim as well as the perpetrator. [Continue reading…]

Declan Walsh reports: An attack early Thursday on a major Pakistani air force base where some of the country’s nuclear weapons are thought to be stored set off a heavy gun battle in which eight attackers and one security official were killed.

The authorities believe Islamic militants are responsible for the attack, on the Minhas air force base in Kamra, 25 miles northwest of the capital, Islamabad. The assault was a stark reminder of the militants’ determination to attack Pakistan’s most sensitive installations despite continuing military operations in their tribal hide-outs.

The sprawling air base, in the Attock district of Punjab, is believed by some Western experts to be one of the locations where elements of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, estimated to include at least 100 warheads, is stored. But Pakistani officials have denied that.

Over the past several years there have been several attacks on bases that are believed to be involved in the country’s nuclear program, but most evidence has suggested that the militants were targeting the country’s military capability in general.

The New York Times reports: The Pakistani Parliament on Friday elected Raja Pervez Ashraf, a controversial former cabinet minister, as prime minister, offering a brief respite from a wider confrontation between the government and judiciary that many say is pushing Pakistan toward an early general election.

Members of Parliament cast 211 votes for Mr. Ashraf versus 89 for a token opposition candidate after the Pakistan Peoples Party, which leads the coalition government, announced its support for Mr. Ashraf.

Mr. Ashraf was a contentious choice, dogged by corruption accusations and partly blamed for the severe electricity crisis that triggered violent riots in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, early this week. A large faction inside the ruling party vocally opposed his election, party officials said.

President Asif Ali Zardari endorsed Mr. Ashraf on Friday after days of judicial intrigues and political turbulence that had shaken the country’s fragile democratic foundations.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court dismissed the previous prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, because he had refused to restart a long-dormant corruption case against Mr. Zardari in Switzerland. Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry said Mr. Gilani had committed contempt by refusing the court’s orders and was no longer fit for public office. Critics countered that the court was playing a dangerous political game.

Then, on Thursday, a lower court blocked Mr. Zardari’s preferred choice for prime minister, Makhdoom Shahabuddin, after the military-controlled Anti-Narcotics Force obtained a warrant for Mr. Shahabuddin’s arrest on drug charges.

In the context of the crumbling relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan, Andrew Bacevich writes: A larger reorientation of U.S. policy is underway. Occurring in two spheres — the Greater Middle East and East Asia — that reorientation reduces Pakistan in Washington’s eyes to the status of strategic afterthought.

In the Greater Middle East — the geographic expanse in which the global war on terrorism has been largely waged — the Obama administration has now abandoned any pretense of liberating or pacifying or dominating the Islamic world. Through a campaign of targeted assassination (supplemented in the case of Iran with cyber attacks) the aim is now merely to keep adversaries off-balance in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. In that context, Pakistan serves chiefly as a target-rich environment.

In East Asia, the Obama administration touts its proposed strategic “pivot” as the emerging centerpiece of U.S. national security policy. In Washington, however, “pivot” is a code word, translated by those in the know as “containing China.” The imperative of thwarting China’s perceived (but as yet indecipherable and perhaps undetermined) ambitions elevates the importance of India. In the eyes of aspiring Kissingers, an India aligned with the United States will check Chinese power just as aligning China with the United States once served to check Soviet power. Here too the effect is necessarily to render Pakistan, which views India as its mortal enemy, redundant.

Yet while a certain logic informs the coming U.S. abandonment of Pakistan, there are massive risks as well.

Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world. (Go ahead: Plug that sentence into your search engine.) Mired in poverty, burdened with a dysfunctional government and weak institutions, dominated by deeply fearful military and intelligence establishments that have little regard for civilian control or democratic practice, it possesses one trump card: a formidable nuclear arsenal. A potential willingness to use that arsenal is what ultimately makes Pakistan so dangerous — and should give U.S. policymakers pause before they give that country the back of their hand, as the United States has done so many times before.

To the extent that foreign policy ends up figuring in the upcoming presidential election, Iran’s putative nuclear weapons program will probably attract some attention. OK, but that’s a potential bomb, not a real one. The bomb that will keep the next president up late is not the one that Iran may be building but the one that Pakistan already holds in readiness to use.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports: Pakistan’s combative top judge made his most audacious foray into judicial activism yet on Tuesday, firing Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, emptying the cabinet and forcing President Asif Ali Zardari to reset his fragile governing coalition.

Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry’s order was the culmination of a three-year transformation that has injected the once supine Supreme Court into the heart of Pakistan’s power equation. Yet in doing so, Justice Chaudhry has ventured deeply into the political fray, drawing accusations of partisan, even grudge-driven, prosecutions.

“This is a court that is determined to establish itself as a player to be respected and feared,” said Cyril Almeida, a political analyst with Dawn newspaper. “First it was elbows out, now it’s come out swinging — and it’s knocked out the prime minister.”

The true target of Justice Chaudhry’s order, though, may have been President Zardari. The two men have been at odds since 2009, when Mr. Zardari opposed Justice Chaudhry’s reinstatement. They have engaged in proxy combat through the courts ever since — indeed, Mr. Gilani’s dismissal stemmed directly from his refusal to heed court orders to pursue a corruption inquiry against the president.

Tuesday’s decision presented a blunt challenge to the president’s authority; one critic, the human rights campaigner and lawyer Asma Jahangir called it a “soft coup.” And its disruptive effects on his governing Pakistan Peoples Party could lead to a new round of national elections well ahead of their scheduled date next spring.

For Justice Chaudhry, the action also offered a convenient diversion from an awkward affair: less than a week ago, the judge found himself explaining his personal finances in court after a billionaire property developer with close ties to both the P.P.P. and the military came out with explosive corruption allegations against his family.

Now, those accusations, which damaged the judge’s anticorruption credentials and may have tarnished his populist appeal, are likely to be sidelined amid the fresh political maneuvering over his ruling on Tuesday.

The Associated Press reports: A militant commander in northwest Pakistan warned polio vaccination teams on Saturday to stay away from the territory he controls near the Afghan border, saying he would not allow immunizations until U.S. drone attacks in the country are stopped.

The statement by Hafiz Gul Bahadur is an obstacle to efforts to beat polio on Pakistan, one of only three nations where the virus is endemic.

The threat came in a pamphlet distributed Saturday in markets in the troubled North Waziristan tribal region. “We don’t want benefits from well-wishers who spend billions to save children from polio, which can affect one or two out of hundreds of thousands, while on the other hand the same well-wisher (America) with the help of its slave (Pakistan’s government) kills hundreds of innocent tribesmen including old women and children by unleashing numerous drone attacks,” it said.

The pamphlet also said spies could enter the region under the cover of vaccination teams to get information for the United States about “holy warriors.” It said teams who disregarded his warning would be responsible for any consequences.

The New York Times reports: Pakistan’s top court convicted Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of contempt on Thursday, imposing a token sentence that deflated some of the political pressure around the case, but which could result in Mr. Gilani’s ouster.

Facing a courtroom packed with lawyers, cabinet ministers and journalists, Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk issued a strongly worded verdict that found Mr. Gilani guilty of “disobedience” toward the Supreme Court and bringing “ridicule” on its judges.

But instead of jailing the prime minister for six months, as the law provides, the judge imprisoned him only until the court adjourned — an event that occurred seconds later when Mr. Gilani, by then smiling toward his supporters, was still seated.

The courtroom drama brought an immediate sense of relief that a feared institutional clash had at least temporarily abated. But it also signaled that the drama was moving from the judicial into the political arena.

After the hearing, Mr. Gilani, dressed in a traditional long coat, left the court amid a scrum of cheering supporters before speeding off to a cabinet meeting about the crisis. Political rivals, declaring that his moral authority had collapsed, called for his immediate resignation.

“Prime minister should immediately resign,” the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, told the private television station Geo. “He should step down without causing further crisis.”

But at a news conference hours later, the information minister, Qamar Zaman Kaira, said the cabinet had decided there were no grounds for resignation.

The lenient sentence was a victory for Mr. Gilani and the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party, which has been locked in legal battle with the Supreme Court since January. At issue is a letter that the court has ordered Mr. Gilani to write to prosecutors in Switzerland, effectively urging them to revive a dormant corruption case against his boss, President Asif Ali Zardari.

Mr. Gilani has flatly refused the order, citing Mr. Zardari’s immunity from prosecution, drawing the ire of senior judges who viewed his stance as a brazen challenge to their authority.

But some analysts said that, after months of high-profile hearings that drew uncompromising rhetoric from both sides, Thursday’s verdict signaled a retreat for the court in legal terms.

The New York Times reports: In what is being called the biggest jailbreak in Pakistani history, Taliban fighters stormed a prison in the northwestern town of Bannu early Sunday, freeing almost 400 prisoners, including a militant commander who tried in 2003 to assassinate the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

The assault started at 1:30 a.m. when at least 100 militants driving pickup trucks and armed with grenades and small arms attacked the main gate of the prison, which housed 900 inmates, provincial government officials said.

After blasting their way into the prison, the attackers broke open cell doors and freed 384 inmates, including several who had been condemned to death, said Mohammad Azam Khan, the home minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province.

A senior security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said prison guards had offered little resistance to the Taliban, who were in “total control” of the facility for over two hours. “The militants asked them to get aside and leave,” he said.

The fierce, disciplined raid represented an operational boost and a propaganda coup for the Pakistani Taliban, which wasted little time in claiming responsibility.

“We have released our men without losing a single man,” said Ihsanullah Ihsan, a spokesman for the group, speaking from an undisclosed location. “We had been planning this blessed operation for months.”

The New York Times reports: In a rare show of unity, the government and opposition joined on Thursday to present the United States with a list of stringent demands, including an immediate end to C.I.A. drone strikes, that were cast in uncompromising words but could pave the way for a reopening of NATO supply lines through the country.

After two and a half weeks of contentious negotiations, the main parties agreed on a four-page parliamentary resolution that, in addition to the drone demand, called on the Obama administration to apologize for American airstrikes in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. It declared that “no overt or covert operations inside Pakistan shall be permitted” — a broad reference that could be interpreted to include all C.I.A. operations.

But on the issue of NATO supply lines, the resolution specified only that arms and ammunition cannot be transported through Pakistan, opening the door to the resumed delivery of critical Afghan war supplies like food and fuel for the first time since the November airstrikes. And in practice, arms and ammunition were rarely, if ever, transported in convoys through Pakistan.

Declan Walsh reports: Fakhra Younas went under the surgeon’s knife 38 times, hoping to repair the gruesome damage inflicted by a vengeful Pakistani man who had doused her face in acid a decade earlier, virtually melting her mouth, nose and ears.

The painful medical marathon took place in Rome, a distant city that offered Ms. Younas refuge, the generosity of strangers and a modicum of healing. She found an outlet in writing a memoir and making fearless public appearances.

But while Italian doctors worked on her facial scars, some wounds refused to close.

On March 17, after a decade of pining for Pakistan, a country she loved even though its justice system had failed her terribly, Ms. Younas climbed to the sixth-floor balcony of her apartment building in the southern suburbs of Rome and jumped. She was reported to be 33 years old.

News of her death filtered back to her home city, Karachi. And by the time her coffin arrived for burial, a storm of outrage had been whipped up — one framed by a glittering Hollywood success.

On Feb. 28, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a Karachi filmmaker, won Pakistan’s first Academy Award, for “Saving Face,” a documentary that focuses in gritty detail on victims of acid violence like Ms. Younas. Despite the film’s disturbing topic, the Oscar gave Pakistanis a welcome shot of national pride, while focusing attention on a social ill.

Acid is the preferred weapon of vindictive men against women accused of disloyalty or disobedience. Common in several Asian countries, acid attacks in Pakistan grew sharply in number in 2011, to 150 from 65 in 2010, although some advocacy workers said the increase stemmed largely from better reporting.

The death of Ms. Younas galvanized the Pakistani news media. In Parliament, lawmakers vowed to take action, while one political leader called for a criminal investigation into the case to be reopened. But legal experts were skeptical that would happen, because the man Ms. Younas long accused of the attack — her ex-husband, Bilal Khar — was acquitted at trial nine years ago.

Unlike most men accused in acid attacks, Mr. Khar comes from a wealthy, powerful background. His family owns vast swaths of rich farmland in Punjab Province; his father, Mustafa, is a former provincial governor; his first cousin Hina Rabbani Khar is Pakistan’s foreign minister. In recent weeks, Mr. Khar appeared on television several times to defend his reputation. “My hands are clean,” he said during one broadcast.

The appearances won him little public sympathy, with critics saying that the case exemplified how Pakistan’s rich frequently evade justice. Yet there was a ringing contrast between the howls of condemnation and the virtual silence that greeted Ms. Younas after she was attacked a decade ago. And it raised a question: When this clamor has receded, will Pakistan’s next acid victims stand a better chance of obtaining justice? [Continue reading…]