May God bless her soul and who murdered her get what’s in returned.

Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books

THERE ARE no words of sufficient force to summarize this week’s attempted murder of fourteen year-old Malala Yousafzai, in the northwest Pakistan city of Mingora. Yet as shocking as this savagery is, there is nothing new about it either: depravity is the business of the Taliban franchise. There are however some lessons to be drawn from the years during which the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (abbreviated as TTP and known also as the Pakistani Taliban) terrorized the Swat valley and Mingora specifically.

The rise of the Pakistani Taliban coincided with, but was not an outcome of, the American and British entrance into the Northern Alliance battle against the Afghani Taliban. Here I should remind the reader that the Taliban of Afghanistan and Pakistan share a name and a list of enemies but little else. In structure, interests and objectives they differ, and excepting a short-lived declaration of common purpose — to…

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