Spozhmai didn’t follow instructions. Instead, she ran away from her male guardians and chose to ask for the protection of the Afghan police. Taken into protective custody, she appealed to Afghan President Hamid Karzai to not send her back home. “God did not make me to be a suicide bomber. I ask the President to put me in a good place,” she pled. Her life with her family was like that of a slave. She was not allowed to learn to read and write. Instead she stayed indoors always and cooked and cleaned, day and night. The Afghan authorities asserted that they would not return the girl to her family unless tribal elders guaranteed her safety.
On the other side, the spokesperson of the Afghan Taliban denied the group’s involvement in coercing the girl to engage in a suicide attack. The story was false, they said, and the girl’s story was nothing more than Government propaganda. “We never do this, especially with girls,” Qari Yousef Ahmadi told the media. The last three words of his sentence were important. Girls, after all, were to be indoors and unschooled; the political act of martyrdom, something they sell as an ultimate act of heroism to their conscripts, is something too important to be wasted on the unholy and female.
These are the two visible ends of the argument. On one, are those who want to save girls like Spozhmai, whose stunning story garners her more attention than the perfunctory bits awarded to the everyday abused girl who tries to run away from the cruelties of home and captivity. On the other, are the Taliban, for whom the very idea of a girls’ school has become so imbued with imperialism and occupation that all iterations of female education, even the barest possibility of a female presence beyond the home, must be obliterated.
The details of Spozhmai’s story present a third reality. The mercenary benefits that the Taliban and their affiliated groups attach to those that volunteer for suicide bombings are an important denominator here. In the hardscrabble economy of this area, where war is the past, the present, and the future, several thousands of rupees can mean the difference between a family’s survival and its extinguishment. A son sacrificed to a suicide bombing means a one-time payment, a complete loss of earning potential to the promises of heaven mouthed by recruiters. Enter daughters, all only costs and burdens and promises of future debts. Slipping a daughter instead of a son into a suicide vest thus presents the opportunity to maximise the yield from the transaction of terror. A blown up girl minimises losses, leaves behind the boys for other things, and allows for the survival of the family in whose servitude she lives.
The calculations are dark; but similarly dim are the prospects for the girls that are not yet blowing themselves up. In the tribal areas and in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, thousands of schools have been bombed in the past several years as Taliban encroachment has graduated from a possibility to a reality. In the paltry few weeks of 2014, three girls’ schools have already been bombed. In Charsadda, explosives were lobbed over the boundary wall to maim the main building. In Landi Kotal, armed men sowed bombs in the empty rooms of Said Akbar Kali Girls School, their explosions blowing through the silence and destroying all intentions of education. A few days later, bombs bloomed at a school in Bannu. The Government Girls Primary School, located in the limits of the Huwed Police Station, thus breathed its last.
None of the culprits planting bombs in these fallow fields of female enrichment have been apprehended, and there is no likelihood that they will be. The songs to female education in Pakistan, so resounding in the years of international aid agencies and urban do-gooders, do not echo in these school-less climates. Stuck are they between the Western desire to cover up with schools the stabbings of strategic imperatives and the Taliban insistence on sacrificing girls at the altar of an imagined Islamic authenticity.
The girl bomber exists because, to both of them, her existence represents the vacuity of their meaningless mantras. In the land of the Taliban, the schools have bombs and the girls too have bombs. The buildings of one lie maimed and mangled; the bodies of the other are reduced to just that — only bodies — their tasks to carry the burdens of others, always babies and now bombs.