Taliban shoot teenage peace prize-winner in Pakistan

That Malala Yusufzai is brave and principled is beyond question. But she is also only 14. International organisations and news organisations first paid her attention when, at the age of 11, she started to campaign for girls’ education in her home town of Mingora, which had fallen under the control of the Pakistani Taliban.

Her ambition, she told the New York Times, was to be a doctor. She began to blog for the BBC Urdu service under a pseudonym. With the guidance of her father, she gave several other interviews. Last December, the Pakistani government awarded her the National Peace prize. She was nominated for an International Children’s Peace Prize.

All of which was very fine until today when Taliban gunmen lay in wait for her outside her school. As she emerged and boarded the school bus, they shot her in the head. Another girl and their teacher were also injured. The Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, justified his men’s action. “She was young but she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas,” he told Pakistani journalists. “This was a new chapter of obscenity, and we have to finish this chapter.”

The doctors say that the next few days will be decisive. She might be OK, or she might have long-lasting injuries. Hundreds of Pakistanis who want to donate blood for her have thronged to the hospital where she is being treated under armed guard.

International attention

I have a lingering worry that the interest of international journalists and NGOs has not helped Malala. On the one hand, such attention provides support and, if there is an attack, as there has been, a guaranteed international outcry. But becoming a cause celebre makes you vulnerable too.

Maybe the Taliban would not have bothered about a schoolgirl who stood up to them if she hadn’t attracted so much national and international interest. By showering praise on a young woman  whose views echo and therefore justify our own are we being self-indulgent, endangering her further to prove the point that we are right and they, the Taliban, are barbaric?

Malala was named after the Afghan Joan of Arc, Malalai of Maiwand, who fought the British in the 1880s. She too was a teenager. After several battles, she was killed but legend has it that her memory spurred other Pashtuns to fight.

Let us hope that today’s Malala will not have sacrificed so much for her people.

Follow Lindsey on Twitter via @lindseyhilsum