How did the Taliban change the life of a young girl and her society? Why did she speak out against them, at the risk of her own life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Malala Yousafzai was only 10 years old when the Taliban arrived in her hometown in Pakistan. As their attacks on women\u2019s and girls\u2019 freedoms rapidly escalated, Malala began to speak out against them, even as she and her family faced death threats. When Malala was 15, the Taliban shot and nearly killed her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read more to learn about Malala, the Taliban in Pakistan, and why they’re such fierce enemies of each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
According to Malala, the Taliban in Pakistan changed her life forever. While her identity was influenced by her family\u2019s positive values, both she and her father were also shaped by the rise of the Taliban during their lifetimes. We\u2019ll first discuss Malala\u2019s perspective on the origins of the Taliban in the 1980s and 1990s. Then, we\u2019ll examine the terrorist group\u2019s increasing power in the Swat Valley after the 9\/11 terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1977, when Malala’s father was eight, there was a military coup in Pakistan and a general named Muhammad Zia ul-Haq seized control from the elected prime minister. General Zia tried to win the support of the Pakistani people by campaigning to make Pakistan a strict Muslim country and arguing that it was the people\u2019s religious duty to obey his government<\/strong>. Many madrasas were opened during his rule, and Islamic studies became a required class in secular schools. Zia also enacted many laws curtailing women\u2019s rights.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: Britain partitioned Pakistan from India along religious lines\u2014India was primarily Hindu and Pakistan was primarily Muslim.<\/a> Despite Pakistan\u2019s large Muslim population, however, the government of Pakistan remained secular following its 1947 independence<\/a> from Britain. For years, Pakistan was divided over the role of Islam in politics.<\/a> This ended with Zia\u2019s coup. Zia\u2019s \u201cIslamization\u201d of Pakistan went hand in hand with his legal and social programs to reverse women\u2019s rights and emphasize their domestic role as a key aspect of Muslim life.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, the Soviet Union invaded Pakistan\u2019s neighbor, Afghanistan, in 1979. Millions of Afghans fled to Pakistan; General Zia accepted them as refugees and began a program to train them as mujahideen, or resistance fighters. These mujahideen eventually became the Taliban.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: In Arabic, the term mujahideen<\/em> means anyone who takes part in a jihad<\/em>, or a struggle for the sake of Islam. In English, mujahideen<\/a> is more specifically defined as Islamic guerrilla fighters, and jihad<\/a> means a holy war waged on behalf of Islam as a religious duty.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malala writes that, in training these fighters, Zia gained favor with the US, for whom the Soviet Union was the primary enemy in the Cold War. Western countries sent billions of dollars and weapons to help Pakistan\u2019s military intelligence service, ISI, train men to fight the Soviet Union\u2019s Communist army. Zia also gained favor with the Arab world, which saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an attack by infidels on a fellow Muslim country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: During the 1980s, the CIA provided $2-3 billion in covert assistance to Pakistan<\/a> to train 80,000 Afghan mujahideen. Pakistan trained about 90,000 mujahideen in total, including the founder of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Omar.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Clerics in the mosques began to preach about the Soviet invasion, saying it was the Pakistani people\u2019s duty as Muslims to join the jihad against the Soviet infidels.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: As a result of this support for jihad, in the mid- to late 1990s, approximately 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistanis fought in Afghanistan on the side of the Taliban. Some sources estimate that 20-40% of Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan were Pakistani<\/a>. Pakistani political parties recruited volunteer Taliban fighters from the madrasas<\/a>, which became increasingly militant. In addition, Pakistan provided logistical support and supplies to the Afghan Taliban. After nine years, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988-89<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n On September 11, 2001, the terrorist attacks in the US happened. The leader of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization, Osama bin Laden, was living in Kandahar, Afghanistan at the time. America sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan to catch him and overthrow the Taliban regime that had protected him. <\/strong>Just as America had needed Pakistan\u2019s help to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, it also needed Pakistan\u2019s help to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. As a result, America embraced General Pervez Musharraf, who was Pakistan\u2019s president at the time and who agreed to help the US with its \u201cWar on Terror.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: The War on Terror<\/a> is a global military campaign initiated by former US President George W. Bush to combat terrorism following the 9\/11 attacks and continued through successive administrations. While the War on Terror succeeded in toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and eliminating many of al-Qaeda\u2019s senior members, including Osama bin Laden in 2011, critics argue that it often employed illegal tactics to do so, including detaining people without trial at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, Cuba and using torture to extract confessions.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malala writes that, because Pakistan\u2019s intelligence service, ISI, had essentially created the Taliban, many ISI officers were close to Taliban leaders. So, even as Pakistan assisted the Americans, they were still providing weapons to Taliban fighters and sheltering their leaders in Pakistan.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2004, the Americans launched a drone attack in a region of Pakistan where they believed Osama bin Laden was hiding. They followed that attack with two more, killing over 100 Pakistanis. As a result of these attacks and Pakistan\u2019s support for the US War on Terror, militancy and anti-government sentiment began to grow within Pakistan.<\/strong> This eventually contributed to the emergence of the Pakistani Taliban.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Shortform note: Just as many fighters in the Afghan Taliban were Pakistani, many leaders of the Pakistani Taliban were veterans of the war in Afghanistan<\/a>. These men had long provided support for the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In the late 2000s, spurred on by their anger at Musharraf\u2019s support for America\u2019s War on Terror, they also began to direct their militancy toward their own government.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2002, the MMA Alliance won the elections in Malala’s province. They were a group of five religious parties, including the one that had run the madrasas where the Taliban were trained. The MMA tore down billboards featuring pictures of women or covered the images with black paint. They took female mannequins from clothing shops and insisted women wear head coverings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malala’s father opened his high school in 2003; at the time, boys and girls were in the same classes. But, by the following year, having co-ed classes was no longer an option.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2005, a massive 7.6 earthquake hit Pakistan, killing over 73,000 people. The Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, or TNSM\u2014a group that had sent men to fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan and was now led by Maulana Fazlullah\u2014provided some aid to remote villages that the government hadn\u2019t been able to help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Taking advantage of the atmosphere of fear created by the earthquake, mullahs (religious leaders) from the TNSM preached that the earthquake was a punishment from God for women\u2019s freedoms and obscenity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malala was 10 when the Taliban came to the Swat Valley, seemingly appearing out of nowhere. The Taliban fighters were armed with knives and Kalashnikovs (assault rifles) and wore black badges that said \u201cSharia law or martyrdom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their leader was 28-year-old Fazlullah. He set up a radio station in the Swat Valley known as Mullah FM, and people called him the Radio Mullah<\/a>. Many people in Swat got all of their information from the radio because they didn\u2019t have a TV or were illiterate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many people were fed up with the slow-moving and corrupt Pakistani justice system, so they agreed with Fazlullah\u2019s ideas about bringing back Islamic law. Six months after Mullah FM began broadcasting, people started heeding Fazlullah\u2019s admonishments to get rid of their TVs, CDs, and DVDs. The Taliban gathered the electronics in huge piles and burned them in the streets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fazlullah often preached directly to women, instructing them to stay home and go outside only in emergencies. Soon, the Radio Mullah was preaching that girls should not go to school.<\/strong> On his radio program, he named girls who had quit school and congratulated them, saying they\u2019d go to heaven. He also told women not to go shopping at the bazaar. If they did try to go, the Taliban would shout at and intimidate them until they went home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One day, when Malala and her family were passing through a Taliban checkpoint, Taliban soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs told Malala and her mother that their failure to wear Burqas was shameful. When the family returned home, they found a note from the Taliban on the gates of Ziauddin\u2019s school. It threatened severe punishment unless the school stopped teaching girls.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n While all this was happening, the authorities and the people did nothing to stop it. Malala’s father said that people had been seduced by Fazlullah.<\/strong> However, clashes between the Taliban and the Pakistani government in Islamabad (the capital of Pakistan) led Musharraf to send the army into the Swat Valley. This was the beginning of a conflict between the army and the Swat Taliban that would last for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The army succeeded in driving Fazlullah and his fighters into the mountains, but, within a week, 40 Taliban leaders from across Malala’s province met to form a united front. They called themselves the TTP, or Pakistan Taliban. Besides fighting government forces, they also acted as a morality police, targeting women who weren\u2019t observing purdah.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister who had recently returned from exile, gave a speech in which she condemned the militants. Immediately after the speech, she was assassinated. Many Pakistanis, including Malala, felt that their hope for democracy and women\u2019s rights in the country died along with her.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPrecursors to the Taliban in the Swat Valley<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The Taliban\u2019s Imposition of Increasingly Harsh Sharia Law in the Swat Valley<\/h3>\n\n\n\n