A 15-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl remains in critical condition after being shot in the head for defying the Taliban and championing the right of girls to go to school. Malala Yousafzai rose to prominence during the recent war in Pakistan's Swat Valley by writing a blog under a pen name. NPR's Philip Reeves reported on that war — and twice met Malala's father. Reeves sent this account of the tough world in which Malala spent her childhood.
Malala's father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, is sitting behind his desk in his small, rather tatty office. He is speaking, rapidly and passionately, between sips of tea. The subject of our conversation is an issue that, for him, represents a daily mortal threat: the Taliban.
It is August 2008. Beyond the office door, amid the heat and bustle of a late summer morning, lies the city of Mingora. In the dusty haze beyond that, there are the rivers and orchards of Swat Valley, gloriously ringed by mountains.
Tourists used to come here from far and wide, to hike the trails, fish the streams and ski. But war has crept down into Swat Valley from the nearby mountains of the tribal belt along the Afghan border. Swat is turning into a battleground in which the Pakistani army and the Taliban are slugging it out.
Both sides are causing havoc. Both sides are committing atrocities.
Scattered around the valley is the evidence of the Taliban's recent handiwork — the blackened ruins of at least 100 girls' schools, firebombed by Islamist militants in an effort to ensure the next generation of Swat's females are imprisoned in their homes.
That is why I have come on this hot morning to talk to Yousafzai. He is the chairman of the Swat Private Schools Association, and the head of a girls' school.
He is also known in Pakistan as a tireless peace campaigner. Many in this troubled valley are afraid to talk publicly because of the risk of retribution. He is not.
"How can we think of ignoring half of our population ... to keep them illiterate and ignorant?" he says, leaning in to get closer to my microphone, as the conversation turns to the Taliban's attempts to obliterate any prospect that Swat's girls will ever be educated.
A Daughter In Her Father's Image
Yousafzai's daughter, Malala, would later publicly and persistently ask the same question as her father. She would pay for doing so with a bullet to the head.
But on this day back in August 2008, I had no idea that Malala exists, or that — aged 11 at that time — she would soon begin secretly writing a diary chronicling the travails of life as a child at war in Swat Valley for the BBC's Urdu Service.
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Malala Yousafzai is treated in a hospital in Peshawar, Pakistan, after she was shot on Tuesday.