Noorullah Shirzada/Getty Images-AFPBefore classes on Saturday, Afghan students prayed for the recovery of the Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai.HONG KONG — News reports from Pakistan on Sunday said that Malala Yousafzai has about a 50-50 chance of survival, maybe a little better, according to her doctors. She remains stable but unconscious in an army hospital in Rawalpindi.
Military doctors have reportedly consulted with two civilian Pakistani neurosurgeons who have recommended that Ms. Yousafzai be sent abroad for treatment. President Obama also has offered U.S. medical assistance to the Pakistani government, including a military air ambulance.
Dr. Khalid Butt, a former Pakistan Army physician, in a letter to the Dawn newspaper, said, “We may lose Malala Yousafzai if we do not send her to Dubai or the U.K. immediately,” and he noted that “armed forces doctors are not very proficient in complicated injury cases in peacetime.”
He asked military leaders to stop “dilly-dallying” and not make it “a matter of ego and send Malala somewhere where she can be treated better.”
Ms. Yousafzai, 14, a well-known advocate of girls’ education in Pakistan, was shot in the head and neck last week by Taliban gunmen who stopped her school bus and asked the driver if she was aboard. (Dozens of arrests have been made, although the two gunmen, whom the police say they have identified, were still at large on Sunday.)
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack. The group had threatened her before, and as my colleague Declan Walsh reports from Pakistan, a Taliban spokesman has vowed that they will try to kill Ms. Yousafzai again if she recovers.
One of her classmates, Kainat Riaz, 15, also was shot in the attack. Her injuries were less serious, and she told The Nation newspaper on Sunday that she “vowed to continue her education and become a doctor to serve the country.”
The renowned Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai said in The News International that Ms. Yousufzai’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, has long been on a Taliban hit list, “but the militants managed to target the daughter first.”
Ziauddin owns the school that his daughter and other girls attend in Mingora, in the Swat Valley, a poppy-growing area with a large contingent of Taliban fighters. “Being a brave man,” Rahimullah wrote, “he encouraged his daughter to speak her mind even if it was risky.”
In Pashto, “malala” means sad or melancholy, but Mr. Yousafzai and his wife named Malala after Malalai, the Afghan heroine who inspired local fighters against the British at the Battle of Maiwand in 1880. (The spelling discrepancy, her father acknowledged, was his fault.) A fixture of legends, poetry and song, Malalai is often referred to as the Afghan Joan of Arc.
As the teenage daughter of a Pashtun shepherd, Malalai joined Ayub Khan’s forces to carry up fresh ammunition and water to the battlefield. Accounts vary, but at one point she is said to have stripped off her veil to use as a battle pennant.
Some accounts of the battle say she fought alongside her fiancé, and at one point yelled:
“Young love, if you do not fall in the Battle of Maiwand,
By God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame.”
Malalai died in the battle, but the result was a resounding victory for the Afghans. They had three times as many casualties as the British, but the foreigners were forced to retreat to Kandahar.
“During the retreat a number of British soldiers became incapably drunk after raiding the officers’ stores and had to be left behind to be slaughtered by the pursuing Afghans,” said one account. (The backstory of Dr. John Watson, Sherlock Holmes’s fictional sidekick, said he was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand, and his injuries forced his return to London.)
Ironically, the Battle of Maiwand is “frequently referenced in Taliban propaganda” these days as a way to spur resistance against the foreign troops in Afghanistan, according to Benjamin Jensen, an assistant professor at American University’s School of International Service and at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College.
“As the subsequent events showed,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, “Malala lived true to her name and used her pen and speech to accomplish the mission of freedom that Malalai achieved by fighting and nursing the wounded at the battleground of Maiwand.”