Taliban Gun Down Malala Yousafzai, the Girl Who Spoke Up for Her Rights

- By DECLAN WALSH - The New York Times - October 9, 2012

KARACHI, Pakistan - At the age of 11, Malala Yousafzai took on the Taliban by giving voice to her dreams. As turbaned fighters swept through her town in northwestern Pakistan in 2009, the tiny schoolgirl spoke out about her passion for education — she wanted to become a doctor, she said — and became a symbol of defiance against Taliban subjugation.

On Tuesday, cowered, masked Taliban gunmen answered Ms. Yousafzai’s courage with bullets, singling out the 14-year-old on a bus filled with terrified schoolchildren, then shooting her in the head and neck. Two other girls were also wounded in the attack. All three survived, but late on Tuesday doctors said that Ms. Yousafzai was in critical condition at a hospital in Peshawar, with a bullet possibly lodged close to her brain.

A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone that Ms. Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an “obscenity.”

“She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,” Mr. Ehsan said, adding that if she survived, the militants would certainly try to kill her again. “Let this be a lesson.”

The Taliban’s ability to attack Pakistan’s major cities has waned in the past year. But in rural areas along the Afghan border, the militants have intensified their campaign to silence critics and impose their will.

That Ms. Yousafzai’s voice could be deemed a threat to the Taliban — that they could see a schoolgirl’s death as desirable and justifiable — was seen as evidence of both the militants’ brutality and her courage.

“She symbolizes the brave girls of Swat,” said Samar Minallah, a documentary filmmaker who has worked among Pashtun women. “She knew her voice was important, so she spoke up for the rights of children. Even adults didn’t have a vision like hers.”

Ms. Yousafzai came to public attention in 2009 as the Pakistani Taliban swept through Swat, a picturesque valley once famed for its music and tolerance and as a honeymoon destination.

Her father ran one of the last schools to defy Taliban orders to end female education. As an 11-year-old, Malala — named after a mythic female figure in Pashtun culture — wrote an anonymous blog documenting her experiences for the BBC. Later, she was the focus of documentaries by The New York Times and other media outlets.

“I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban,” she wrote in one post titled “I Am Afraid.”

The school was eventually forced to close, and Ms. Yousafzai was forced to flee to Abbottabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was killed last year. Months later, in summer 2009, the Pakistani Army launched a sweeping operation against the Taliban that uprooted an estimated 1.2 million Swat residents.

The Taliban were sent packing, or so it seemed, as fighters and their commanders fled into neighboring districts or Afghanistan. An uneasy peace, enforced by a large military presence, settled over the valley.

Ms. Yousafzai grew in prominence, becoming a powerful voice for the rights of children. In 2011, she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize. Later, Yousaf Raza Gilani, the prime minister at the time, awarded her Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize.

Mature beyond her years, she recently changed her career aspiration to politics, friends said. In recent months, she led a delegation of children’s rights activists, sponsored by Unicef, that made presentations to provincial politicians in Peshawar.

“We found her to be very bold, and it inspired every one of us,” said another student in the group, Fatima Aziz, 15.

Ms. Minallah, the documentary maker, said, “She had this vision, big dreams, that she was going to come into politics and bring about change.”

That such a figure of wide-eyed optimism and courage could be silenced by Taliban violence was a fresh blow for Pakistan’s beleaguered progressives, who seethed with frustration and anger on Tuesday. “Come on, brothers, be REAL MEN. Kill a school girl,” one media commentator, Nadeem F. Paracha, said in an acerbic Twitter post.

In Parliament, Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf urged his countrymen to battle the mind-set behind such attacks. “She is our daughter,” he said.

The attack was also a blow for the powerful military, which has long held out its Swat offensive as an example of its ability to conduct successful counterinsurgency operations. The army retains a tight grip over much of Swat. But that Tuesday’s shooting could take place in the center of Mingora, the valley’s largest town, offered evidence that the Taliban were creeping back.

“This is not a good sign,” Kamran Khan, the most senior government official in Swat, said by phone. “It’s very worrisome.”

The Swat Taliban are a subgroup of the wider Pakistani Taliban movement based in South Waziristan. Their leader, Maulvi Fazlullah, rose to prominence in 2007 through an FM radio station that espoused Islamist ideology.

After 2009, Maulvi Fazlullah and his senior commanders were pushed across the border into the Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nuristan, where Pakistani officials say they are still being sheltered — a source of growing tension between the Pakistani and Afghan governments.

But over the last year or so, small groups of Taliban guerrillas have slowly filtered back into Swat, where they have mounted hit-and-run attacks on community leaders deemed to have collaborated with the government.

On Aug. 3, a Taliban gunman shot and wounded Zahid Khan, the president of the local hoteliers association and a senior community leader, in Mingora. It was the third such attack in recent months, a senior official said.

The military has asserted control in Swat through a large military presence in the valleys and support for private tribal militias tasked with keeping the Taliban at bay. But soldiers have also been accused of human rights abuses, particularly after a leaked videotape in 2010 showed uniformed men apparently massacring Taliban prisoners.

In response to criticism, the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, announced an inquiry into the shootings. An army spokesman said it was not yet complete.

Shah Rasool, the police chief in Swat, said that all roads leading out of Mingora had been barricaded and that more than 30 militant suspects had been detained.

The 3 barbaric, Abrahamic, Adam and Eve based, misogynist, man-made, patriarchal religions: Judaism and its 2 derivatives: Christianity and Islam are, and have always been the agents and promoter of ignorance, hate, violence, rape, murder, plunder, mediocrity and stupidity.

Brave Malala Yousafzai, A Pakistani 12 years old girl, fighting for her freedom and her right to receive education

- By ADAM B. ELLICK - October 9, 2012 - The New York Times

I had the privilege of following Malala Yousafzai, on and off, for six months in 2009, documenting some of the most critical days of her life for a two-part documentary. We filmed her final school day before the Taliban closed down her school in Pakistan’s Swat Valley; the summer when war displaced and separated her family; the day she pleaded with President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to intervene; and the uncertain afternoon she returned to discover the fate of her home, school and her two pet chickens.

A year after my two-part documentary on her family was finished, Malala and her father, Ziauddin, had become my friends. They stayed with me in Islamabad. Malala inherited my old Apple laptop. Once, we went shopping together for English-language books and DVDs. When Malala opted for some trashy American sitcoms, I was forced to remind myself that this girl – who had never shuddered at beheaded corpses, public floggings, and death threats directed at her father — was still just a kid.

Today, she is a teenager, fighting for her life after being gunned down by the Taliban for doing what girls do all over the world: going to school.

The Malala I know transformed with age from an obedient, rather shy 11-year-old into a publicly fearless teenager consumed with taking her activism to new heights. Her father’s personal crusade to restore female education seemed contagious. He is a poet, a school owner and an unflinching educational activist. Ziauddin is truly one of most inspiring and loving people I’ve ever met, and my heart aches for him today. He adores his two sons, but he often referred to Malala as something entirely special. When he sent the boys to bed, Malala was permitted to sit with us as we talked about life and politics deep into the night.

After the film was seen, Malala became even more emboldened. She hosted foreign diplomats in Swat, held news conferences on peace and education, and as a result, won a host of peace awards. Her best work, however, was that she kept going to school.

In the documentary, and on the surface, Malala comes across as a steady, calming force, undeterred by anxiety or risk. She is mature beyond her years. She never displayed a mood swing and never complained about my laborious and redundant interviews.

But don’t be fooled by her gentle demeanor and soft voice. Malala is also fantastically stubborn and feisty — traits that I hope will enable her recovery. When we struggled to secure a dial-up connection for her laptop, her Luddite father scurried over to offer his advice. She didn’t roll an eye or bark back. Instead, she diplomatically told her father that she, not he, was the person to solve the problem — an uncommon act that defies Pakistani familial tradition. As he walked away, she offered me a smirk of confidence.

Another day, Ziauddin forgot Malala’s birthday, and the non-confrontational daughter couldn’t hold it in. She ridiculed her father in a text message and forced him to apologize and to buy everyone a round of ice cream — which always made her really happy.

Her father was a bit traditional, and as a result, I was unable to interact with her mother. I used to chide Ziauddin about these restrictions, especially in front of Malala. Her father would laugh dismissively and joke that Malala should not be listening. Malala beamed as I pressed her father to treat his wife as an equal. Sometimes I felt like her de-facto uncle. I could tell her father the things she couldn’t.

I first met Malala in January 2009, just 10 days before the Taliban planned to close down her girls’ school, and hundreds of others in the Swat Valley. It was too dangerous to travel to Swat, so we met in a dingy guesthouse on the outskirts of Peshawar, the same city where she is today fighting for her life in a military hospital.

In 10 days, her father would lose the family business, and Malala would lose her fifth-grade education. I was there to assess the risks of reporting on this issue. With the help of a Pakistani journalist, I started interviewing Ziauddin. My anxiety rose with each of his answers. Militants controlled the checkpoints. They murdered anyone who dissented, often leaving beheaded corpses on the main square. Swat was too dangerous for a documentary.

I then solicited Malala’s opinion. Irfan Ashraf, a Pakistani journalist who was assisting my reporting and who knew the family, translated the conversation. This went on for about 10 minutes until I noticed, from her body language, that Malala understood my questions in English.

“Do you speak English?” I asked her.

“Yes, of course,” she said in perfect English. “I was just saying there is a fear in my heart that the Taliban are going to close my school.”

I was enamored by Malala’s presence ever since that sentence. But Swat was still too risky. For the first time in my career, I was in the awkward position of trying to convince a source, Ziauddin, that the story was not worth the risk. But Ziauddin fairly argued that he was already a public activist in Swat, prominent in the local press, and that if the Taliban wanted to kill him or his family, they would do so anyway. He said he was willing to die for the cause. But I never asked Malala if she was willing to die as well.

Finally, my favorite memory of Malala is the only time I was with her without her father. It’s the scene at the end of the film, when she is exploring her decrepit classroom, which the military had turned into a bunker after they had pushed the Taliban out of the valley. I asked her to give me a tour of the ruins of the school. The scene seems written or staged. But all I did was press record and this 11-year-old girl spoke eloquently from the heart.

She noticed how the soldiers drilled a lookout hole into the wall of her classroom, scribbling on the wall with a yellow highlighter, “This is Pakistan.”

Malala looked at the marking and said: “Look! This is Pakistan. Taliban destroyed us.”

In her latest e-mail to me, in all caps, she wrote, “I WANT AN ACCESS TO THE WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE.” And she signed it, “YOUR SMALL VIDEO STAR.”

I too wanted her to access the broader world, so during one of my final nights in Pakistan, I took a long midnight walk with her father and spoke to him frankly about options for Malala’s education. I was less concerned with her safety as the Pakistani military had, in large part, won the war against the Taliban. We talked about her potential to thrive on a global level, and I suggested a few steps toward securing scholarships for elite boarding schools in Pakistan, or even in the United States. Her father beamed with pride, but added: “In a few years. She isn’t ready yet.”

I don’t think he was ready to let her go. And who can blame him for that?

The 3 barbaric, Abrahamic, Adam and Eve based, misogynist, man-made, patriarchal religions: Judaism and its 2 derivatives: Christianity and Islam are, and have always been the agents and promoter of ignorance, hate, violence, rape, murder, plunder, mediocrity and stupidity.

U.S. Panel Cites Risks in Chinese Made Computer and Cell-Phone Networking Equipments

- By Michael S. Schmidt, Keith Bradsher and Christine Hauser - The New York Times - October 8, 2012

WASHINGTON — In the latest development to highlight the sensitive terrain that the United States and China are navigating on economic issues, a House committee issued a blistering bipartisan report on Monday that accused two of China’s largest telecommunications companies of being arms of the government that had stolen intellectual property from American companies and could potentially spy on Americans.

The House Intelligence Committee said that after a yearlong investigation it had come to the conclusion that the Chinese businesses, Huawei Technologies and ZTE Inc., were a national security threat because of their attempts to extract sensitive information from American companies and their loyalties to the Chinese government.

The companies sell telecommunications equipment needed to create and operate wireless networks, like the ones used by Verizon Wireless and AT&T. Many of the major suppliers of the equipment are based outside the United States, creating concerns here about the security of communications.

Those concerns are most acute about Huawei and ZTE because of their close ties to the Chinese government, which the committee said has heavily subsidized the companies. Allowing the Chinese companies to do business in the United States, the report said, would give the Chinese government the ability to easily intercept communications and could allow it to start online attacks on critical infrastructure, like dams and power grids.

The release of the report comes as both presidential candidates have spoken of the importance of United States ties with China and have promised to act strongly on Chinese currency and trade practices that are damaging to American business interests.

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, has called repeatedly during his campaign for a more confrontational approach to China on business issues, although he has focused his warnings more on Chinese currency market interventions than on the activities of the nation’s telecommunications companies.

President Obama has also taken a tougher stance on China recently. Late last month, Mr. Obama, through the Committee on Foreign Investment, ordered a Chinese company to divest itself of interests in four wind farm projects near a Navy base in Oregon where drone aircraft training takes place. It was the first time a president had blocked such a deal in 22 years.

The Obama administration has also filed a case at the World Trade Organization in Geneva accusing China of unfairly subsidizing its exports of autos and auto parts, the ninth trade action the administration has brought against China.

“We have a process that is not aimed at one specific company but using all the assets and parts of U.S. government aimed at protecting our telecommunications and critical infrastructure,” a senior White House official said.

The report was released on Monday morning at a news conference held by

Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative C. A. Ruppersberger of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee.

They said that the United States government should be barred from doing business with Huawei and ZTE and that American companies should avoid buying their equipment.

The report said the committee had obtained internal documents from former employees of Huawei that showed it supplied services to a “cyberwarfare” unit in the People’s Liberation Army.

The United States government, the report said, should go through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency panel that reviews the national security implications of foreign investments, to carry out its recommendations. It also said that committee should block any mergers and acquisitions involving the Chinese companies and American businesses.

In the course of the investigation, the House committee said it had uncovered evidence of economic espionage — and officials said on Monday that they planned to hand over the evidence to the F.B.I.

Former and current employees for Huawei, the report said, told investigators for the committee that the company had committed “potential violations” in the United States related to immigration, bribery, corruption and copyright infringement.

Huawei has been the focus of criticism and security warnings for years, including by the Defense Department. Its expansion plans in the United States have faced resistance from Congress over questions about its ties to the military in China.

Huawei denies being financed to undertake research and development for the Chinese military, and its executives have repeatedly insisted that they have nothing to hide. The company issued an open letter to the United States government in February 2011, asking for an inquiry to clear up what it characterized as misperceptions about its history and business operations.

At the news conference, Mr. Rogers and Mr. Ruppersberger said they told the Chinese companies that they had to be more transparent but were disappointed by incomplete and contradictory responses to their questions. Mr. Rogers said the committee was concerned that the companies were extensions of the Chinese government because they were so heavily financed by it.

In testimony before the House committee in September, officials from both Huawei and ZTE said that supposed “back doors” in its software that provided unauthorized access to American companies’ computers were flaws, not intentional vulnerabilities.

But Mr. Rogers said the companies had been told to tell the Chinese to “stop hacking” into American companies and infrastructure if they wanted to do business in the United States.

“The world is a changed place,” Mr. Rogers said. “We better have faith and confidence in our network.”

In a statement, Huawei condemned the committee’s investigation and report. “Unfortunately, the committee’s report not only ignored our proven track record of network security in the United States and globally, but also paid no attention to the large amount of facts that we have provided,” Huawei said in its statement, later adding that “the report released by the committee today employs many rumors and speculations to prove nonexistent accusations.”

Huawei has had considerable success in winning large telecommunications contracts in Europe and in emerging markets. But it has had little success in the United States, where politicians have long worried, despite Huawei’s denials, that it might be used for Chinese eavesdropping or other cyberwarfare activities.

The company was founded in 1987 by Ren Zhengfei, a former officer of the People’s Liberation Army and a military technology researcher who has run it ever since. The company is owned by its employees and, unlike many Chinese corporations, has chosen not to sell shares in Hong Kong or the United States, which would equire financial disclosures.

ZTE said on Monday that it “had set an unprecedented standard for cooperation by any Chinese company” with a Congressional investigation.

“ZTE is China’s most transparent, independent, globally focused, publicly traded telecom company,” the company said in a statement.

At a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing on Monday before the release of the report in Washington, Hong Lei, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said “I hope the United States will respect the facts, abandon prejudice and do more things conducive to China-U.S. economic and trade cooperation, rather than the opposite.”

Michael S. Schmidt reported from Washington and Christine Hauser from New York. Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Quentin Hardy from San Francisco.