Rob Crilly: Where are the Pakistan politicians with the courage of Malala?

THE Pakistan Taleban reckoned without the bravery of Malala Yousafzai’s schoolfriends. One by one they have promised to defy the threats and face down the thuggish ideology that put a bullet in the head of a 14-year-old girl.

Kainat Riaz was sitting alongside Malala when assassins stopped their school van and began shooting.

“Attacks like this will not stop any of us from going to school or from getting education,” she said recently from her bedroom in the town of Mingora, where she is recovering from bullet wounds. “All of us are determined to go back once the school is open and I am well enough.

The courage of Malala and her friends has been saluted throughout Pakistan. The outcry is unusual in a country where dozens die in violence every day.

The wave of revulsion has carried with it hope that the attempt on Malala’s life may turn out to be a watershed moment that forces Pakistan to re-evaluate its complex relationship with extremist clerics and the militants that it continues to harbour along the Afghan border.

“The time for appeasement is long gone,” wrote Farahnaz Ispahani, a former member of Pakistan’s parliament, last week. “This is an internal struggle for Pakistan and its soul.”

Generals began briefing that they might finally launch a long-awaited offensive against militant havens in North Waziristan, home to the Haqqani network as well as Pakistan’s homegrown Taleban movement, the Tehreek-e-Taleban Pakistan (TTP).

Even they appear to have realised something has changed.

The TTP’s mysterious spokesman has been spinning furiously ever since, trying to find a form of words that can make an attack on a teenage girl seem anything other than a criminal act of inhuman brutality.

Malala is now in the safety of a hospital ward in Birmingham, where she can be protected from Taleban gunmen. And, with her out of the country, it seems as if the issue is already fading from view.

Last Tuesday, Pakistan’s parliamentarians even failed to agree on a resolution calling for a military operation in North Waziristan. Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and military analyst, said there remained far from unanimous support for action.

That leaves a government and military that knows it would still face strong opposition for a widespread offensive in North Waziristan.

Any action inside Pakistan would also bring a high risk of blowback in the form of terrorist attacks.

Instead, ministers have begun briefing that the culprits are from the remnants of the Swat Valley TTP, now holed up across the border in Afghanistan.

It is a convenient way to avoid dealing with the Haqqani network, a group entwined with the TTP in North Waziristan.

None of that would be easy. Pakistan has already suffered tens of thousands of deaths for its part in an alliance with the US fighting al-Qaeda and the Taleban.

A fresh offensive would bring thousands more and the risk of government collapse.

The truth is that a final reckoning with the forces of extremism would take a bold leader, one brave enough to carry his country with him whatever the risks.

And there is not a leader in the country with the courage of Malala and her friends.

• Rob Crilly reports from Islamabad for The Scotsman