It took weeks of back and forth between Washington and Islamabad, or rather army headquarters in Rawalpindi, before the case was finally resolved. What they did was like our traditional
One Monday I was about to measure myself against the wall to see if I had miraculously grown in the night when I heard loud voices next door. My father’s friends had arrived with news that was hard to believe. During the night American special forces called Navy Seals had carried out a raid in Abbottabad, one of the places we’d stayed as IDPs, and had found and killed Osama bin Laden. He had been living in a large walled compound less than a mile from our military academy. We couldn’t believe the army had been oblivious to bin Laden’s whereabouts. The newspapers said that the cadets even did their training in the field alongside his house. The compound had twelve-foot-high walls topped with barbed wire. Bin Laden lived on the top floor with his youngest wife, a Yemeni woman named Amal. Two other wives and his eleven children lived below them. An American senator said that the only thing missing from bin Laden’s hideaway was a ‘neon sign’.
In truth, lots of people in Pashtun areas live in walled compounds because of purdah and privacy, so the house wasn’t really unusual. What was odd was that the residents never went out and the house had no phone or Internet connections. Their food was brought in by two brothers who also lived in the compound with their wives. They acted as couriers for bin Laden. One of the wives was from Swat!
The Seals had shot bin Laden in the head and his body had been flown out by helicopter. It didn’t sound as though he had put up a fight. The two brothers and one of bin Laden’s grown-up sons had also been killed, but bin Laden’s wives and other children had been tied up and left behind and were then taken into Pakistani custody. The Americans dumped bin Laden’s body at sea. President Obama was very happy, and on TV we watched big celebrations take place outside the White House.
At first we assumed our government had known and been involved in the American operation. But we soon found out that the Americans had gone it alone. This didn’t sit well with our people. We were supposed to be allies and we had lost more soldiers in their War on Terror than they had. They had entered the country at night, flying low and using special quiet helicopters, and had blocked our radar with electronic interference. They had only announced their mission to the army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, and President Zardari after the event. Most of the army leadership learned about it on TV.
The Americans said they had no choice but to do it like that because no one really knew which side the ISI was on and someone might have tipped off bin Laden before they reached him. The director of the CIA said Pakistan was ‘either involved or incompetent. Neither place is a good place to be.’
My father said it was a shameful day. ‘How could a notorious terrorist be hiding in Pakistan and remain undetected for so many years?’ he asked. Others were asking the same thing.
You could see why anyone would think our intelligence service must have known bin Laden’s location. ISI is a huge organisation with agents everywhere. How could he have lived so close to the capital – just sixty miles away? And for so long! Maybe the best place to hide is in plain sight, but he had been living in that house since the 2005 earthquake. Two of his children were even born in the Abbottabad hospital. And he’d been in Pakistan for more than nine years. Before Abbottabad he’d been in Haripur and before that hidden away in our own Swat Valley, where he met Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11.
The way bin Laden was found was like something out of the spy movies my brother Khushal likes. To avoid detection he used human couriers rather than phone calls or emails. But the Americans had discovered one of his couriers, tracked the number plate of his car and followed it from Peshawar to Abbottabad. After that they monitored the house with a kind of giant drone that has X-ray vision, which spotted a very tall bearded man pacing round the compound. They called him the Pacer.
People were intrigued by the new details that came every day, but they seemed angrier at the American incursion than at the fact that the world’s biggest terrorist had been living on our soil. Some newspapers ran stories saying that the Americans had actually killed bin Laden years before this and kept his body in a freezer. The story was that they had then planted the body in Abbottabad and faked the raid to embarrass Pakistan.
We started to receive text messages asking us to rally in the streets and show our support of the army. ‘We were there for you in 1948, 1965 and 1971,’ said one message, referring to our three wars with India. ‘Be with us now when we have been stabbed in the back.’ But there were also text messages which ridiculed the army. People asked how we could be spending $6 billion a year on the military (seven times more than we were spending on education), if four American helicopters could just sneak in under our radar? And if they could do it, what was to stop the Indians next door? ‘Please don’t honk, the army is sleeping,’ said one text, and ‘Second-hand Pakistani radar for sale… can’t detect US helicopters but gets cable TV just fine,’ said another.
General Kayani and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the head of ISI, were called to testify in parliament, something that had never happened. Our country had been humiliated and we wanted to know why.
We also learned that American politicians were furious that bin Laden had been living under our noses when all along they had imagined he was hiding in a cave. They complained that they had given us $20 billion over an eight-year period to cooperate and it was questionable which side we were on. Sometimes it felt as though it was all about the money. Most of it had gone to the army; ordinary people received nothing.
A few months after that, in October 2011 my father told me he had received an email informing him I was one of five nominees for the international peace prize of KidsRights, a children’s advocacy group based in Amsterdam. My name had been put forward by Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa. He was a great hero of my father for his fight against apartheid. My father was disappointed when I didn’t win but I pointed out to him that all I had done was speak out; we didn’t have an organisation doing practical things like the award winners had.
Shortly after that I was invited by the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, to speak in Lahore at an education gala. He was building a network of new schools he calls Daanish Schools and giving free laptops to students, even if they did have his picture on their screens when you switched them on. To motivate students in all provinces he was giving cash awards to girls and boys who scored well in their exams. I was presented with a cheque for half a million rupees, about $4,500, for my campaign for girls’ rights.
I wore pink to the gala and for the first time talked publicly about how we had defied the Taliban edict and carried on going to school secretly. ‘I know the importance of education because my pens and books were taken from me by force,’ I said. ‘But the girls of Swat are not afraid of anyone. We have continued with our education.’
Then I was in class one day when my classmates said, ‘You have won a big prize and half a million rupees!’ My father told me the government had awarded me Pakistan’s first ever National Peace Prize. I couldn’t believe it. So many journalists thronged to the school that day that it turned into a news studio.
The ceremony was on 20 December 2011 at the prime minister’s official residence, one of the big white mansions on the hill at the end of Constitution Avenue which I had seen on my trip to Islamabad. By then I was used to meeting politicians. I was not nervous though my father tried to intimidate me by saying Prime Minister Gilani came from a family of saints. After the PM presented me with the award and cheque, I presented him with a long list of demands. I told him that we wanted our schools rebuilt and a girls’ university in Swat. I knew he would not take my demands seriously so I didn’t push very hard. I thought,
It was decided that the prize should be awarded annually to children under eighteen years old and be named the Malala Prize in my honour. I noticed my father was not very happy with this. Like most Pashtuns he is a bit superstitious. In Pakistan we don’t have a culture of honouring people while they are alive, only the dead, so he thought it was a bad omen.
I know my mother didn’t like the awards because she feared I would become a target as I was becoming more well known. She herself would never appear in public. She refused even to be photographed. She is a very traditional woman and this is our centuries-old culture. Were she to break that tradition, men and women would
