Shooting schoolgirl shows Taliban's evil, barbarism

The dark side of religion is that without temperance it produces monsters that use it as an excuse to commit horrendous acts against their fellow humans.

No better example of that is in the latest Taliban atrocity — the shooting of a 14-year-old Pakistani girl who had the temerity to oppose their policies of female oppression and had made an international name for herself in the process. She was quietly sitting on a bus when her assailant boarded, asked where she was sitting and shot her in what obviously was a planned attack sanctioned by her country’s chapter of the radical Muslim group.

Malala Yousufzai’s only crime was to defy the organization’s ban on female schooling, aimed at keeping women subservient to the point of being chattel. She was in the forefront of spoiling a good thing as far as they were concerned.

Immediately following al-Qaida’s September 2001 attack on the United States, the Taliban was almost annihilated in Afghanistan during the hunt to find Osama bin Laden. But that effort got set back — and extended beyond reason — by the withdrawal of resources to invade Iraq. Now the Taliban’s resurgence makes it clear that when we do pull out of this frightfully unstable area of the world, the monstrous organization quickly will be back in full force.

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