When the Taliban shot child peace activist Malala Yousufzai in Pakistan

An award-winning young Pakistani peace activist was shot in a deliberate attack in October 2012. She underwent surgery, the cost of which the Pakistani government and several hospitals promised to cover, and she was expected to recover from her injuries.

The shooting targeted Malala Yousufzai, 14, who for several years has advocated secularism and education opportunities for girls in a blog for BBC Urdu. She reported on life in the Swat Valley where the Taliban was burning girls' schools. Last year, she was nominated for the International Children's Peace Prize and received the National Peace Prize from one of Pakistan's former prime ministers. 

On Oct. 9, 2012, strange men disguised with scarves approached a school bus in Malala's hometown of Mingora, asked the children to point out Malala to him, and then fired. Two bullets struck her head and neck. Surgeons said her skull was cracked, and although the bullet did not penetrate her brain, her brain swelled and she was unresponsive. A bullet had to be surgically removed from her neck.

Two of her female classmates were also wounded in the attack. They were shot in the shoulder and in the leg.

News of the attack quickly spread across the world. At a concert in Los Angeles the next day, the singer Madonna stripped to her bra, displaying the name "MALALA" written on her lower back.

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the attempted assassination. Calling the girl "pro-West" and "against Taliban," the group's spokesman warned that they would try to kill her again if she survived her injuries, and that "anybody who speaks against us will be attacked in the same way."

All schools in the Swat Valley – a large area near the border of Afghanistan that is home to about one million Pakistanis – temporarily closed in response to the shooting.

Speaking two days after the attack, Pakistan's foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar said that about a hundred people had been arrested for possible connections with the attackers.

Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari condemned the attack. Zardari has unfortunately been affected by such violence many times, including by the assassination of his own wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, in 2007. In the wake of Malala's shooting, Zardari invited former U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown to travel to Pakistan in the near future to discuss children's education. Brown accepted, and he referred to Malala as an "icon for courage and hope."

"Directing violence at children is barbaric, it's cowardly," said a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department.

The spokesperson for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that the Secretary-General's sympathies were with the wounded girls' families, and that he "expresses his solidarity with the Government and people of Pakistan in their efforts to confront violent extremism."

After her injury, Malala continued her advocacy work for the rights of all children to have an education. Two years and a day after the shooting, she won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2014. Pakistan's prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, called her “the pride of Pakistan”. Malala cannot go home to Pakistan, however, for her own safety. She attends school in Birmingham, England.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Oct. 12, 2012. Pencil drawing by Tucker Lieberman, based on a photograph of Malala Yousufzai.

Ten years later:

"As of late August [2022], the southern province [of Sindh] had already gotten almost six times as much rainfall as its 30-year annual average.

Those rains combined with glacial melt have caused the flooding that has devastated the country.

* * *

Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority said the floods have killed at least 1,314 people, including 458 children, according to The Guardian. Around 33 million others have been affected by the flooding. Many have had to flee their waterlogged homes to stay in shelters or tent encampments.

* * *

Climate change fueled the floods in multiple ways. Intense heat waves earlier in the year caused the air to hold more moisture, and meteorologists at the time said that would lead to “above normal” rain in the monsoon season, Islamabad water-resources engineer Zia Hashmi told the journal Nature. That same heat melted glaciers in the north of the country, swelling the rivers that lead to the south.

* * *

...while Pakistan contributes to less than 1% of the world’s carbon emissions, it’s one of the top 10 countries hit hardest by rising temperatures."
— "Pakistan's Devastating Floodwaters Could Take 6 Months To Recede," Hilary Hanson, Sept. 14, 2022, Huffington Post, 2022

The controversy over releasing the identity of a man who helped kill Osama bin Laden

A memoir of the killing of Osama bin Laden was published by Penguin on Sept. 11, 2012, the eleventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on U.S. soil perpetrated under bin Laden's direction. The publisher describes the book as a "blow-by-blow narrative" that "is an essential piece of modern history." (Read a review posted to Goodreads on Sept. 19, 2012.)

No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden was written by a U.S. Navy SEAL using the pseudonym Mark Owen. Owen was one of 24 men who participated in the raid. Navy SEALs meet strict requirements for physical fitness, mental aptitude, and psychological resilience before entering rigorous training.

Even before his book hit the shelves of bookstores, "Owen" was expected to face legal charges for publishing it. His contract with the Pentagon forbid him to reveal information about the raid. When, on Nov. 5, 2014, the author sued his attorney for $8 million for incorrectly advising that the book did not need to be reviewed by the Department of Defense, he revealed in the lawsuit that the government was demanding a penalty of $4.5 million from the author. The amount represented the current and expected future proceeds of the book.

The author's real name was revealed by Justin Fishel in a controversial story for Fox News on Aug. 23, and his name is now widely known. Within a day of that story, the book soared to the position of the single best-selling book on Amazon, even though the book was still only available for pre-order.

Fishel had previously blogged about Navy SEAL Team 6 following the famous mission. In a post for Fox News shortly after the 2011 killing of bin Laden, Fishel noted that the small team of elite service-members "have expressed concerns about their safety and the safety of their families now that details of the mission have been made public."

Indeed, the US government did not even want the name of the unit to be made public; Obama did not mention it in his address to the nation immediately following the raid.

The government also declined to release photos of bin Laden's corpse, fearing that the risk of sparking violent retaliation outweighed the benefit of assuring the public of the terrorist's demise.

Why did Fishel, who understands the role of privacy in protecting the SEALs' safety, write a story using the memoirist's real name? Perhaps he believed that the memoirist had put his fellow soldiers at risk and therefore was fair game for retaliation. Fishel quoted a SEAL who said, "How do we tell our guys to stay quiet when this guy [Owen] won't?" and a military spokesman who said, "He’s [Owen's] the one who started this so he bears the ultimate responsibility for this.”

Other major news outlets distanced themselves from Fox's stance. Even though the author's real name had already been revealed, NBC News said it would not use the name in its news stories, and CNN expressed a similar position. Both organizations acknowledged that the publisher of No Easy Day had requested that the media not perpetuate the publication of the author's real name.

Unsurprisingly, the revelation of the SEAL's real identity had prompted terrorist websites to publish death threats against him. It seems likely that news organizations that refrain from publishing the man's real name might feel a lessened sense of responsibility for hate speech that uses the man's real name.

Being "outed" to the press is risky for someone who has participated in classified activity. There are numerous examples of this.

In 2003, White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove told Matt Cooper, a journalist for Time, that former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was an active CIA agent. Days later, Robert Novak published a column in the Washington Post identifying Plame's role. Plame, of course, could no longer serve in the same career once her identity had been made public. It is generally believed that this was done intentionally to punish her husband for publicly disagreeing with one of the White House's positions.

In 2012, another identity disclosure affected a Pakistani man who assisted the US in locating the residence where bin Laden was subsequently killed. A Pakistani tribal court sentenced the man to 33 years in jail on charges of treason.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 27, 2012.

Update

The 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty follows the manhunt of bin Laden. "As an act of myth-making, Zero Dark Thirty is inescapable," Dan Jackson wrote for Thrillist in 2019. "It established the narrative that all future counter-narratives must push back against or attempt to upend."

"The film's dramatic arc," Daniel Klaidman writes, "follows Maya's near-messianic quest to take out 'UBL.' Intense and headstrong, she battles the weary fatalism of her bosses, suppresses all moral doubt about the use of torture to extract leads, and sticks to her theory of the case with feverish conviction. The movie's harrowing, climactic kill operation is Maya's vindication. But then, having identified bin Laden's body in a hangar at Bagram Air Base, she finds herself all alone in a cavernous cargo hold, a thousand-yard stare on her face." ("Will Obama End the War on Terror?" Daniel Klaidman, Newsweek, December 24, 2012, p. 28) "No movie has captured the ethos of the 'we need to kill these people' era better than Zero Dark Thirty." (p. 31)

This American flag was photographed aboard an aircraft carrier on Dec. 7, 2001. San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives. © No known copyright restrictions. Flickr.

Shakil Afridi, doctor who helped US find Osama bin Laden, faces long jail term in Pakistan

Pakistan jailed the doctor who helped the US find Osama bin Laden. Originally posted to Helium Network on May 25, 2012.

Pakistan sentenced a man to a lengthy jail term because he helped the United States locate Osama bin Laden's residence inside Pakistan. The US subsequently raided the compound and killed bin Laden. Pakistan has maintained that the US should have first asked for their cooperation.

The U.S. CIA had asked Dr. Shakil Afridi, a surgeon employed by the Pakistani government, to collect DNA from children living in a suspicious compound. The US wanted the DNA to determine if the inhabitants of the house were family members of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, the group responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. The US already had the DNA of bin Laden's sister.

The US had been aggressively searching for bin Laden ever since 2001. After the US invaded Afghanistan, he was suspected of having escaped over the southeastern border into Pakistan and was widely imagined to be hiding in a cave.

In the decade following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the US gave over $20 billion in aid to Pakistan. Pakistan provided military support to the US invasion of Afghanistan but limited the amount of activity that the US could conduct inside Pakistan. Diplomatic relations were always strained.

Eventually suspicion fell on a million-dollar compound near a Pakistani military academy in Abbottabad. Despite the apparent wealth of the owner, the compound reportedly had no Internet access and all trash was burned. It seemed a likely hideout for a criminal.

Update: It is now widely believed that Pakistani Brigadier Usman Khalid, a senior intelligence officer, leaked the whereabouts of bin Laden to the US. Seymour Hersh wrote for the London Review of Books in May 2015 that bin Laden was kept prisoner in the Abbottabad compound for years by Pakistan's intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Khalid revealed the location for millions of dollars of reward money, according to Pakistan's The News. Carlotta Gall said that the reporter for The News is credible, and on May 12, 2015 she approved of the overall theory in the New York Times: "On this count, my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s."

To attempt to obtain the DNA from the residents of the compound, Afridi ran a fake vaccination program. "Although Afridi apparently failed to collect blood," Ismail Khan wrote for the Brisbane Times, "he was able to secure a telephone number for Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, bin Laden's trusted courier, enabling the CIA to confirm his identity."

The U.S. subsequently sent in Navy SEAL Team 6 which killed Osama bin Laden in the compound on May 2, 2011. Bin Laden was shot in the head and chest and was quickly buried at sea, eliminating the possibility that his grave would become a shrine for terrorists that would require ongoing military attention. The Taliban - an organization closely allied with bin Laden's al Qaeda - quickly acknowledged that bin Laden had indeed been killed in the raid.  Ayman al-Zawahiri was announced a month later as the new leader of al Qaeda.

Pakistan reacted angrily to the raid by asking the US to limit its military presence in Pakistan and threatening to reduce their cooperation with the US.  They claimed that the US's failure to inform them of and include them in the raid implied a lack of trust.

One of bin Laden's three wives revealed that Bin Laden's family had been living there since 2005, prior to which they had lived elsewhere in Pakistan.  None of the three women are Pakistani; after the raid, they were detained by Pakistani officials and were charged with immigration violations in March 2012. Bin Laden was not Pakistani either. He did not have a citizenship; Saudi Arabia had revoked it in 1994 due to his terrorist activities.

The identity of Afridi, the doctor who worked with the US to identify the residents of the compound, was somehow made public. On May 23, 2012, a tribal court in Pakistan's Khyber district sentenced Afridi to 33 years in jail, to be slightly reduced if he pays a fine amounting to several times the annual income for an average Pakistani. Afridi was not present at his trial and had no legal representation. According to the BBC, trials at tribal courts do not always follow typical procedures.

Had he been charged under Pakistani penal law, however, he might have been subject to the death penalty. He is now being held in isolation at the central jail in Peshawar, a compound fenced off from the road with guard towers of sand-colored brick. Prison officials say they are concerned for his safety and his health.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have verbally defended Afridi. Panetta told 60 Minutes in January 2012 that Afridi "was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan" and "was helping to go after terrorism." It is unclear whether the US "outed" Afridi to Pakistan and why he was not given asylum in the United States.

The day after Afridi's sentencing, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee reacted by unanimously voting to cut aid to Pakistan by $33 million, symbolic of his 33-year sentence. This was in addition to significant cuts they had already recommended. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called Pakistan a "schizophrenic ally" while Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) called the situation "Alice in Wonderland at best."

Update: In March 2014, Afridi's sentence was reduced to 23 years. In March 2015, Afridi's former lawyer was fatally shot near Peshawar, Pakistan; two militant groups claimed responsibility.

Pakistan has argued that the U.S. killing of bin Laden violated its sovereignty. On the request of parliament, Pakistan's Abbottabad Commission produced a report, hundreds of pages long, inquiring into the incident.

According to Pakistan's AAJ News, Afridi was convicted of "offences against the state, conspiracy or attempt to wage war against Pakistan, concealing with intent designs to wage war against the state and on charges of working against the country's sovereignty."

It is hard to see how the assassination of bin Laden harmed Pakistan's national interests, making the charge of treason questionable. Rather, the UK's Daily Mail reported that "the sentence is viewed by Western officials as punishment for humiliating the nation which claimed not to know it was harbouring the Al Qaeda leader."

Among Pakistan's troubles are the growing mobilization of its religious extremists against its more moderate, democratically elected officials. As just one example, when the governor of Punjab province, home to half of Pakistan's population, was assassinated by his own bodyguard on January 4, 2011, no clerics were willing to recite funeral prayers, fearing for their own safety. Other politicians, including former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, have also been assassinated in recent years by extremists. This violent climate has a constraining effect upon the words and actions of many otherwise liberal politicians.

Wikipedia: Shakil Afridi

Punjabi governor assassinated for lenience over blasphemy conviction

Asia Bibi, an illiterate Christian mother, has been in jail for years under a death sentence following her conviction for blasphemy in Pakistan. Then, Punjabi governor Salman Taseer was assassinated. Originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 14, 2011.

A water well. Image by: Urek Meniashvili © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license Wikimedia Commons.

Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab province, which is home to half of Pakistan's population, was assassinated on Jan. 4, 2011. Taseer's compassionate intercession on behalf of a poor Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy proved to be his undoing, as his assassin claimed to have acted to discourage Taseer's attempt to reform the harsh law.

The story of Taseer's assassination therefore really begins with the story of Asia Bibi (also known as Asia Noreen), a 45-year-old peasant woman who raises five children with her husband, Ashiq Masih, 51. Her life changed on June 14, 2009 in her village of Ittan Wali in the district of Nankana Sahib in the Punjab province, where she and several dozen Muslim women were picking falsa berries, a purple fruit used to make desserts and soft drinks. One woman asked Bibi to bring her some water; when she did, the other women warned her not to drink water from a vessel that Bibi had touched, since she was not Muslim and was an "untouchable." Pakistan is 96 percent Muslim. Bibi's family are the only Christians in the village.

Several days later, the women complained to the village imam, Qari Mohammed Salim, that Bibi had said that the Quran was "fake," that Muhammad "had worms in his ears and mouth" while on his deathbed, and that he married Khadija for her money. On June 19, the imam complained to the police and led a mob that pursued Bibi with a noose through Ittan Wali's dusty streets lined with small sand-colored houses. Bibi's 15-year-old stepdaughter witnessed the attack by the mob and said she "saw them push her hard against a wall and tear her clothes." The police arrived as Bibi was being beaten. They arrested her and brought her to the neighboring Sheikhupura district jail. The imam claims that Bibi confessed and apologized to him, while Bibi claims that she only apologized for hurt feelings and did not confess to blaspheming.

Bibi was convicted of violating Section 295-C of Pakistan's penal code which mandates either death or life imprisonment for one who "defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad." The law was implemented in 1986 by the military dictator Gen. Zia-ul-Haq. Since its inception, nearly a thousand people have been charged under the law, and while no one has ever been executed by the state for a blasphemy conviction, dozens of Pakistanis connected with blasphemy cases - including relatives of the accused and a judge - have been killed by individuals or mobs. Most recently, on Jan. 24, 2014, a mentally ill British national, Mohammad Asghar, was sentenced to death for claiming to be a prophet of Islam.

On Nov. 9, 2010, while a mob raged outside the courthouse and the judge nervously retired three times to a private room for thought, Bibi was sentenced to hang. She was also fined 100,000 rupees (more than the average annual income in Pakistan). The judge said there were "no mitigating circumstances" that would have persuaded him toward leniency. Bibi, who cannot read or write, says that the other village women had long pressured her to convert to Islam and that she was never asked to provide a statement during her trial.

Interviewed in jail, Bibi recalls that she screamed upon hearing her death sentence. The imam in her village who led the mob against her, on the other hand, said he wept for joy when she was sentenced. Her husband and children said they were perpetually on the move, trying to stay ahead of the death threats by phone.

This is where Gov. Salman Taseer stepped in. He visited Bibi in jail soon after her sentencing and petitioned Pakistan's president Asif Ali Zardari to pardon her. 

Zardari has been a beacon for liberal democracy in Pakistan. He is no stranger to violent religious fanaticism; he was married to Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, who was assassinated in 2007. When his ally Taseer brought the harsh and transparently unfair blasphemy case to his attention, he was sympathetic and indicated that he would pardon Bibi. However, a court ruled that the president could not interfere until the sentence was confirmed by the highest court in Punjab, until which time Bibi would have to remain in jail. It was known that this could take several years. (As of January 2014, the sentence still has not been confirmed, and Zardari has been replaced as president by Mamnoon Hussain.)

The militant rhetoric against Bibi soon reached a fever pitch. In December 2010, cleric Moulana Yousaf Qureshi told a crowd of hundreds: "I will pay 500,000 rupees for the loyal follower of Muhammad who beheads Asia Bibi." Hatred brewed not only for the peasant woman but for the governor who was expressing his desire to reform Pakistan's anti-blasphemy law. Rallies against changing the law were held on Dec. 24 after Friday prayers by groups including the political party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazal ur Rehman (JUI-F) and the ad-hoc radical Muslim alliance Majlis-e-Tahafuz-e-Namos-e-Risalat. During another round of protests a week later, police used tear gas to prevent marchers from reaching one of President Zardari's homes in Karachi.

On Jan. 4, 2011, Gov. Taseer's own bodyguard riddled him with 26 bullets in the Kohsar Market in Islamabad. Funeral prayers were recited the next day at the governor's house in Lahore with many sympathetic federal ministers present. One of them, Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah, said that murder over free speech is forbidden by Islam and by Pakistan's PPP government. Taseer's coffin, swathed in the green Pakistani flag with its white star and crescent, was then flown by helicopter to the military's Cavalry Graveyard in Lahore. No clerics in Lahore could be found to lead the prayers; they were led by Allama Afzal Chisti of the Ulema wing of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP). Taseer's son, Shehryar Tasser, lodged a First Information Report (FIR) at the Kohsar police station under Clauses 7 and 302 of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

The curly-bearded assassin Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri recorded an official confession proudly explaining that he hatched the plot by himself because he disagreed with Taseer's position on the anti-blasphemy law. He was brought into court on Jan. 10, a day earlier than originally planned; his defense lawyers said they were not invited to this hearing. The Times of India reported that the Punjabi government would begin screening the Elite Force bodyguards for possible radical religious leanings, and would remove bearded bodyguards.

Rao Abdur Raheem, 30, had founded a lawyers' group a month prior to Taseer's assassination supporting the blasphemy law and opposing Taseer's campaign to reform it. The group is called the Movement to Protect the Dignity of the Prophet. Following Taseer's assassination, Raheem organized lawyers from the cities Islamabad and nearby Rawalpindi to defend the assassin. As of Jan. 10, one thousand lawyers had given their signed support and the government had been swayed against changing the assassin's court venue. It is unclear if the lawyer's group continues to exist.

In addition to the support of the young lawyers, there was also extensive popular support in favor of Taseer's assassination, as evidenced by 2,500 messages on Facebook supporting the assassin within four hours of the crime, according to a former law enforcement official. Taseer's assassin has remained in Adyala jail; two years after the event, his supporters rallied once again to free him.

As of late 2014, Bibi is still in jail under a death sentence. Her family is afraid she will be at risk of assassination if she is released. She has an upcoming court hearing on Oct. 16. Through her husband's visits to her in jail, a French journalist was able to interview her indirectly and to ghost write the book "Blasphemy: A Memoir: Sentenced to Death Over a Cup of Water." Pakistanis like Bibi, who suffer under repressive laws, are still waiting for the necessary cultural shifts that will allow them to live free from fear.