THEY SHOOT SCHOOLGIRLS, DON’T THEY?

[Published in DAWN on 18 October 2012 with the title The Indispensable Half]

It says much for the Taliban that they should have used the only weapon they know – a gun – against an unarmed fifteen year-old school-girl whose only defence against them was her brain. The two cowards who shot Malala Yousufzai may have succeeded in disabling her for the time being; they have certainly crippled their own cause forever.

The attack by the Taliban on Malala was as unconscionable and inexplicable as the destruction by them of the gigantic statues of Buddha at Bamiyan in 2001.  That wanton act of desecration has since become a byword for religious intolerance, just as Malala’s victimization will, as long as human memory holds, be regarded as a symbol of the cause of female empowerment through education.

Today, about nine and a half million children (half of them girls) obtain primary education in Pakistan. Only a third of their mothers are literate. Does the Taliban have enough bullets to silence all of them?

Every shade of public opinion in Pakistani society has joined the chorus in deploring what had happened to Malala. And so they should. Yesterday, it was Rimsha and blasphemy; today it is Malala and female education; tomorrow it could be and might well be womanhood itself. 

Someone who has a beard longer than those of the Talibans should remind them of the verses of Sura Al Nahl that castigated those fathers who, on siring a daughter, agonised over whether to ‘keep her with disgrace or bury her alive in the dust?’ When those verses were revealed, the issue was whether girls should be permitted the divine gift of life or not. The issue in this century is whether girls are to be allowed the equally divine gift of knowledge. It does not require another revelation to remind us that women are not a subspecies of the human race. They are half the reason, the indispensable half, why there is a human race at all. 

Afghanistan, another name for the maelstrom out of which the Taliban emerged as a deadly vapour, has been in a state of conflict for almost a generation. From the fall of Taliban until the year 2010-11, the United States has provided over $67 billion in assistance to a population of 28 million Afghans. Out of that, $39 billion has been spent to equip and train Afghan forces to protect the Afghanis against themselves. 

The overall cost to the Americans has been even higher. Over the decade of its involvement between FY2001 and FY2011, US intervention in Afghanistan has cost its taxpayers almost $ 450 billion. In the current year alone, $16 billion in aid is being provided, in addition to about $90 billion for U.S. military operations. Another $9.2 billion in aid has been requested for FY2013. And yet Afghanistan remains poor, ungovernable and comparatively illiterate. Paraphrasing what Sarojini Naidu once said of Mahatma Gandhi, it is costing the US a fortune to keep Afghanistan in a state of poverty.

If one ignores the bellicose rhetoric that attempts to justify the presence of US and its allies in Afghanistan, one would realise that Taliban could not have emerged or survived as a threat to a modern Islamic secularism without being supported by something other than belief and conviction. Shadowy powers with hands invisible to the audience manipulate the Afghans and the Taliban against each other. It is the real-time version of the Indonesian Wayang puppet drama that re-tells the conflict between Ram and the demon Ravana.   

For there to be a true closure to the Afghanistan/ Taliban problem, perhaps one should rely upon the experience of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He once suggested to his Deputy (and later successor) Gordon Brown the electoral slogan ‘Tough on Crime.’  Gordon Brown sharpened its ending with:  ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.’  When a segment of rational society calls for strong action against the Taliban, they too could go one stage further and demand exposure of those governments and regimes which support the Taliban.

There will be as many opinions as there are voices on who exactly is funding the Taliban. Is it Pakistan’s ISI? If not, perhaps a rogue element within it?  Is it Russia, determined to bleed the US in retribution for the blood it shed in the 1980s?  Or is the Taliban sustaining itself by peddling its harvest of poppy seeds on international street-corners?

War is never cheap. The Vietnam War cost the US $738 billion (in today’s dollar equivalent); the Iraq war another $784 billion. How much education could that have bought? The bullet shot at Malala cost the same amount as her monthly school fees.

Malala’s sacrifice has demonstrated that the only counter to the Taliban is not a bullet. It is education. Even in Saudi Arabia – an Islamic Vatican with hereditary cardinals but no Pope - 58% of Saudi Arabia's college students are women. Almost 85% of its female graduates are re-absorbed into education. Perversely, Saudi women may not be permitted by their government to drive cars in the kingdom, but they are trusted enough to be the drivers of the next generation of Saudis. Saudi Arabia knows, as every Muslim community must, that it cannot stifle female emancipation; all it can do is to postpone it.

That is equally true in Pakistan. Public opinion and time is on the side of girls like Malala.  Malala Yousufzai may never again be the effervescent, outspoken young champion of her gender or of her generation. Cruelly, she may never be aware how her cause has galvanised her country out of its chauvinistic apathy. As a female student in Swat, she was all too vulnerable; as a potent symbol, she is indestructible. 

©F.S. AIJAZUDDIN