So much for the urgent need to reach out to the Taliban — which itself reached out to violently silence a 14-year-old girl.
And to silence her for the horrible crime of advocating that young women have a right to an education.
Malala Yousafzai is fighting for her life in a Pakistani hospital after a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus and shot her and a fellow student in the head and neck.
The Pakistani Taliban — who share the “twisted ideology” (as the country’s army chief put it) and goals of its Afghan counterpart — not only admitted responsibility for the attempted murder, but boasted about it.
Even more horrifying: The group vowed that if she recovers, they’ll shoot her again. And they won’t stop until she’s dead.
“She has become a symbol of Western culture,” said a Taliban spokesman. “Let this be a lesson.”
It’s a lesson all right — to those who think that the West can actually negotiate with such barbarians.
And to those in Washington who — as CBS foreign correspondent Lara Logan warned in a Chicago speech last week — are propagating the “major lie” that “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban.”
Malala became an international celebrity at age 11 in 2009 after she began writing a then-anonymous blog about life under the Taliban in her northwestern village.
Her father ran a school that defied the Taliban edict against educating girls, but he was forced to close it and the family had to flee when she was publicly identified.
She has since become a widely renowned champion of women’s and children’s rights.
Though she knew she was marked for death, she insisted on very visibly attending school, writing that she “dreamt of a country where education would prevail.”
It’s easy to dismiss those who shot her down as simple-minded cowards.
But as Lara Logan warned, it goes beyond that. The Taliban and al Qaeda haven’t been vanquished — they’re coming back.
Indeed, she suggested the administration is deliberately downplaying the Taliban’s strength to justify President Obama’s move to withdraw US troops from the region.
“You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight,” she said. “In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”
If the shooting of Malala Yousafzai doesn’t make that crystal clear, nothing will.