Everyone in Swat understood the significance of the name of Yousafzai’s school. As a young man, Yousafzai had learned to be a passionate nationalist in part by reciting the verse of Khushal Khan Khattak, the seventeenth-century Pashtun warrior-poet known for his courage against the conquering Moguls. The man to see in Mingora, Yousafzai served on the city’s Qaumi Jirga, or assembly of elders, and fought a constant battle with the army and the local authorities over the woeful conditions in the city—power outages, unclean water, unsanitary clinics, inadequate education facilities. Funds for textbooks took months to arrive and were often stolen by bureaucrats. The vast gulf between Pakistan’s cities and its rural areas was a travesty; FATA and Swat were ruled by Draconian laws based on tribal practice and a code that dated back to the colonial era. Yousafzai wrapped himself in optimism, convinced that he could make a difference in the city by applying the principles of peaceful dissent promoted by the twentieth-century Pashtun leader Abdul Ghaffar (Badshah) Khan, known as “the Frontier Gandhi,” who also fought for the establishment of an autonomous nation—Pashtunistan.
“I used to warn him, ‘Ziauddin, be careful. There are people out to get you.’ He never listened,” said the author Aqeel Yousafzai, a war reporter based in Peshawar. Ziauddin named Malala after Malalai, the Afghan Joan of Arc, who died in battle, carrying ammunition to the freedom fighters at war with the British in 1880.
As a teenager, Ziauddin had experienced the changes when Swat became the training ground for jihadists on their way to fight in Afghanistan. His favorite teacher tried to persuade him to join the crusade. “I had nightmares all through those years,” he said recently. “I loved my teacher, but he tried to brainwash me.” Education saved him, and he determined to spend his life trying to improve schools for children, especially girls. A man with a desperate mission, he would drive every few weeks to Peshawar to alert the media to the increasing danger in his area, and he sent reporters there emails describing the failure of the army to keep order and the anarchy created by a new Taliban squad on the edge of Mingora. The Taliban presence in Swat, he told the writer Shaheen Buneri, “was not possible without the tacit support of the government and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Both view militant organizations as strategic assets.”
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“Are you an actress or a circus performer?” the tutor to the young Prince of Swat asked Life photographer Margaret Bourke-White when she visited the principality in 1947. No one in Swat, Bourke-White noted in her book Halfway to Freedom, had ever seen a woman in slacks. For years Swat was a British princely state, under the rule of an appointed regent, the Wali of Swat. The bearded wali, whom Bourke-White photographed, ruled his feudal land of five hundred thousand subjects with a few telephones connecting his fortresses. But his son, the prince, was determined to bring the outside world into Swat.
The wali had been known for his English suits and his rose garden. In 1961, Queen Elizabeth II visited the enchanted Brigadoon and praised it as “the Switzerland of the British Empire.” Each morning the new wali toured his principality—about the size of Delaware—to see how he could help his subjects. Passionate about education, the wali built tuition-free colleges, which every child could attend. Swat became a province of Pakistan in 1969, and its universities turned out many freethinkers, including Ziauddin Yousafzai, who was the president of the Pashtun Student Federation.
“Right from the beginning, Malala was my pet,” Yousafzai told me. “She was always in the school and always very curious.”
“They went everywhere together. Ziauddin loves all children too much. And no one more than Malala,” said Maryam Khalique, the principal of Khushal school, who lived next door to the family. Ziauddin teased his young sons by calling them “those naughty little boys,” but his daughter was special. For the first years of Malala’s life, the family lived in a two-room apartment in the school. She had the run of all the classrooms. “She would sit in the classes when she was only three, listening, her eyes sparkling,” Khalique said. “A little girl taking in the lessons of the older children.”
Malala’s mother was traditional and chose to remain in purdah, but in private she backed Malala’s independence, friends say. Later, in front of reporters, Malala would listen quietly when her father was chided for not allowing her mother the freedom he encouraged in his students. Ziauddin once asked Zebu Jilani, a granddaughter of the last wali and founder of the Swat Relief Initiative, who lives in Princeton, New Jersey, to speak to his Jirga. “Five hundred men and I, the only woman? And an American woman at that?” she asked him. Ziauddin obliged her by taking his wife, completely covered. As a child, Malala could go anywhere as long as she was escorted by a male relative, usually her father. She would even sit by his side when he met in the house with the Jirga.
“He encouraged Malala to speak freely and learn everything she could,” one teacher told me. She wrote long compositions in perfect penmanship. By the fifth grade she was winning debating contests. Urdu poetry was part of the curriculum, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the revolutionary poet and former editor of the Pakistan Times, was a favorite writer: “We shall witness [the day] that has been promised when . . . the enormous mountains of tyranny blow away like cotton.” Khalique had one strict rule for her students: no shortwave radio from the two channels that broadcast Maulana Fazlullah, the shock jock who had declared himself the leader of the Swat Taliban.
THE RISING TERROR
“We need to fight against America! We need to stop the NATO forces. They are infidels!” In the autumn of 2007, the big get for Peshawar’s TV journalists was the hard-line radio mullah who was terrorizing the Swat Valley. Fazlullah’s emblematic white horse grazed outside his compound. One of Ashraf’s first assignments for Dawn TV was to get Fazlullah on-camera. Why, Ashraf wondered, would anyone take seriously a fat killer who had dropped out of his madrassa and for a time run the local chairlift? In the villages, Taliban squads with Kalashnikovs stood by cots covered with gold jewelry that Fazlullah’s followers had been exhorted to donate for his cause. “Turn off your TV,” he told his listeners. “Shows like Dallas are the instruments of the Great Satan.” Ziauddin said of him, “He was not a sane person. He was against polio vaccinations. He burned TVs and cassettes. A crazy madman. And one has to speak out against that.” At first, “Maulana Radio” was considered a joke, a Talib cartoon with gaps between his teeth. Shortwave and battery-operated radio was crucial in rural Pakistan, where few could read and there was hardly any electricity. Fazlullah hijacked two FM channels for his twice-daily broadcasts, and he threatened to kill anyone who tried to compete on the area’s forty stations. For Swatis, Fazlullah’s harangues became a favorite entertainment. Pakistan’s think tanks warned of “Talibanization” in rural areas, but mullahs such as Fazlullah were perceived as Robin Hoods, who promised to fight the endless corruption and decrepit infrastructure of the frontier.
There was only one public, dial-up computer in Mingora. Every day Ashraf struggled to get online, trudging through Green Square, where Fazlullah’s thugs would dump the bodies of apostates they had flogged. Crowds would gather at Fazlullah’s mosque to witness the floggings. “The government says we shouldn’t do things like this public punishment, but we don’t follow their orders. We follow the orders of Allah!” Fazlullah screamed into his PA system. New Yorker writer Nicholas Schmidle, as a young visiting scholar, was able to penetrate the area with a fixer. He saw men on roofs with rocket launchers, scanning the rice paddies and poplar fields for anyone who opposed them. “Are you ready for an Islamic system? Are you prepared to make the sacrifices?” Fazlullah would yell. “Allahu Akbar! [Allah is the greatest!],” the crowd responded, raising their fists in the air.
It could take Ashraf four hours to transmit twenty-eight seconds of film when the computer was able to connect, but there were days with no power. By the summer of 2007, women had been told not to leave their houses. There were rumors that a revered dancer had been found dead in the town square. “I had the
story more or less to myself,” Ashraf said, but no one paid much attention. A news editor in Islamabad said, “Why is no one else reporting this?”
By November 2007 they were. Islamabad’s Red Mosque was in ruins, badly damaged in July, when the government sent troops to clean out hundreds of extremists. The mosque was a few blocks from the ISI headquarters, a symbol to many of how complex the political alliances were. Soon Fazlullah declared an all-out war on Swat. The first target was a girls’ school in a town twenty minutes from the Khushal school. The explosions occurred at night, when there were no children in school, for Pashtuns believe that children must never be harmed in an act of revenge.
In December 2007 former prime minister Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan to seek reelection, and millions turned out to greet her. In one of her last interviews Bhutto said that al-Qaeda could be “marching on Islamabad in two to four years.” In late December she was assassinated by terrorists, and the country erupted. There were more than five hundred attacks in a two-year period, aimed at politicians, reporters, hotels, mosques, and civilians.
Soon terror chiefs were living openly in Lahore. In Mingora, girls whose schools had been destroyed now attended the Khushal school. Government schools were not an option. The monthly budget of two dollars per student that Pakistan allots “could not cover the community schools in the poorest areas, not even in the refugee camps,” said the author Fatima Bhutto, a niece of Benazir Bhutto. “Teachers were political appointees chosen for their loyalty to the ruling party.” Rarely shielded from seeing the injured and the dead, Malala learned to navigate in a war zone, taking on her father’s determination to change the lives of Swatis.
All that year, terror came to Mingora. By December 2008, helicopters and tanks scoured the area, but ten thousand army troops could not take out Fazlullah’s three thousand guerrillas. One-third of the city fled. “The rich have moved out of Swat, while the poor have no place but to stay here,” Malala later wrote. She dreaded Fridays, “when suicide attackers think that killing has special meaning.” Reporters struggled to persuade people to talk on the record, and Ziauddin always would. “There was never any sign of fear,” my colleague Pir Zubair Shah, who then worked for the New York Times, recalled. Shah, who is from a prominent Pashtun family, knew where to get a true sense of what was transpiring. “I would come to see Ziauddin, and Malala would serve us tea,” he said.
THE RIGHT GIRL
“Would you consider hiring on for a month or so to work with the video journalist Adam Ellick?” New York Times documentary producer David Rummel emailed Ashraf in December, after meeting him in Peshawar. Ellick had reported from Prague, Indonesia, and Afghanistan, and was now producing short videos that took viewers inside a compelling personal story. Flying into Islamabad from Kabul, Ellick had the bushy beard of a Talib, but he had little if any experience in Pakistan. He could appear oblivious to tribal codes and brisk to Ashraf when the reporter went through the elaborate greetings dictated by Pashtunwali. “I was used to being called ‘sir’ by my students,” Ashraf told me, “and suddenly someone younger would say to me, ‘Focus on your work. When we work, we work. Why are you shaking hands all the time?’ ”
Working with Ellick was a big break for Ashraf. In graduate school, Ashraf had written his thesis on how Pakistan was perceived in the New York Times. For hours, the two would sit together as Ellick coached him on editing and interviewing techniques. It was a dangerous time for reporters in Pakistan. Working on the links between Taliban extremists and the army, New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall was attacked in her hotel room in Quetta by ISI agents, who took her computer, notebooks, and cell phone. Pir Shah was held by Talib commanders for three days in FATA. Aqeel Yousafzai was almost killed in a Taliban camp outside Peshawar. Brutally beaten, he lost half his teeth before he was rescued. As conditions in FATA grew worse, Dawn’s bureau chief had Ashraf focus completely on Mingora.
The tipping point there came in January 2009 when a dancer named Shabana was murdered, her bullet-ridden body left on display in Green Square. Malala saw it all. “They cannot stop me,” she would later say on-camera. “I will get my education, if it is home, school, or any place. This is our request to all the world. Save our schools. Save our world. Save our Pakistan. Save our Swat.” The English teacher at the school, before announcing that he was leaving, asked Ashraf, “How can I teach these children Keats and Shelley when such things are happening three blocks from our school?” Over the next six months, a million refugees would flee. Then Fazlullah decreed that, as of January 15, all of the girls’ schools in Swat would be closed.
Ashraf saw this as a call to action. “I went to Adam Ellick and I convinced him this is what we should launch as part of the video forum. Education is the most important issue to me, not militancy. I met him in Islamabad, and he said, ‘Go for it.’ Adam asked, ‘Who could be the protagonist who could carry this story?’ ” Ashraf suggested Malala. “When Adam said yes, I went to Ziauddin and said, ‘We can launch this issue in a global forum.’ ” Did it occur to him, I asked, that Malala could be in danger? “Of course not,” he said. “She was a child. Who would shoot a child? The Pashtun tradition is that all children are spared from harm.”
As a fixer, Ashraf had often been fearful of putting foreign reporters in danger. Now he no longer considered himself just a reporter, but a partisan. Along with his closest friend, the BBC’s Abdul Hai Kakar, he was part of a secret resistance operation with Ziauddin and several others. “We would write and report from Fazlullah’s camp half the day and try to stop him the other half of the day,” Ashraf said. He compared their situation to that of the French Resistance. “I was undercover fifteen days of the month. I would tell everyone in Mingora I was leaving for Peshawar, but I would stay, trying to gather information about what was going on.” He and Kakar developed good relations with Fazlullah’s deputies and frequently interviewed the cocky mullah himself, who hoped to use the reporters for propaganda. “Fazlullah, your ambitions will do you in,” Kakar warned him. “They will riot in Islamabad if you try to stop the schools.” By then Malala and her cousins had been forbidden to leave their house, a four-minute walk from school.
* * *
“I’m looking for a girl who could bring the human side to this catastrophe. We would hide her identity,” Kakar told Ashraf. “An Anne Frank?” Ashraf answered, going on to explain the power of the girl in Amsterdam who became an icon through her diary. Meanwhile, Kakar and Ashraf got many queries from French and English news organizations, asking if they knew fixers who could get into the region.
In New York, Dave Rummel saw how powerful a story on the closing of the Swat schools could be. He knew Pakistan well, however, so he was concerned about safety in an area controlled by the Taliban. From Islamabad, Ellick emailed Ashraf:
We need a main character family to follow on both the final days of school (Jan 14–15) and again on the possible new days of school (Jan 31–Feb 2). We want it to play out like film, where we don’t know the ending. That is narrative journalism. And most of all, the family and daughters should be expressive and have strong personalities and emotions on the issue. They must care! . . . Remember, as we discussed several times on Monday, safety first. Don’t take any risks. . . . If you have fear, that is OK. Simply stop reporting.
Ashraf read the email many times and kept coming back to the term “narrative journalism.” He told me, “I had no idea what it meant.” But he had exactly the family in mind he believed would cooperate.
Narrative journalism is almost unknown in India and Pakistan, where stories are told mostly through facts and critical analysis. The intimate narrative—its requirements of real-life emotions and private moments—could be considered a violation in a very traditional area, and for a Pashtun, schooled in hospitality, it would be incomprehensible that such a sensitive line would be crossed. The complexities of personality are considered the work of novelists.
“If this is okay with Ziauddin, let’s do it,�
� Ellick told him. Ashraf said, “I had to convince Ziauddin. I told him it was important for both of us—and for our cause.” Ziauddin rushed to Peshawar with Malala to discuss the idea, since it was too dangerous for foreign reporters to enter Mingora. Ashraf would be the coproducer and make every decision in Mingora.
Ashraf told me, “Ziauddin was very reluctant. He thought it was going to be about all of the schools in Mingora. I kept telling him in Pashto, ‘Don’t worry about the security.’ This was criminal on my part.” At their meeting, Ellick pressed Ziauddin about the danger involved, but no one had to tell a Pashtun about danger. “I will give up my life for Swat,” he told Ashraf on-camera. “Fortunately or unfortunately, Malala answered questions very quickly,” Ziauddin later said. At one point, Malala answered in perfect English, “The Taliban are trying to close our schools.”
“I was opposed,” said Ziauddin. “I did not want to impose my liberalism on my daughter, but a close friend said, ‘This documentary will do more for Swat than you could do in a hundred years.’ I could not imagine the bad consequences.” Later, under an assumed name, Malala would give a speech, “How the Taliban Is Trying to Stop Education,” that was reported in the Urdu press. Inside the Times there was tremendous concern about the risk. “All of the editors were pulled in,” said Rummel. They finally agreed that—given the urgency of the situation—Ziauddin’s role as an activist made the risk one they could take.
* * *
What Ashraf didn’t know was that Ziauddin had already decided on his own to reach out to the international media. “Would you consider allowing one of your students to blog about this order [to close the schools]?” Abdul Kakar had asked him a few weeks earlier. “The BBC needs to broadcast this to the world.” No parent whom Ziauddin approached was willing to take part, however. “Would you consider allowing my daughter?” Ziauddin finally asked. “She’s young, but she can do it.” To protect her identity, Kakar chose the name Gul Makai, the heroine of a Pashto folktale. Her conversations with Kakar would be brief—only a few minutes, just time enough for him to take down a paragraph or two.
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