Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani peace prize winner, is in critical but stable condition after shots to the head and neck. Here’s why she was such a threat to the Taliban:
Ms. Yousafzai had been targeted for her criticism of the Taliban and because it considered her human rights campaigning to be an “obscenity.”
“She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,” a Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, said by phone from an undisclosed location. “She considers Obama as her ideal leader.”
Or more likely, those are just nonsense buzzwords the Taliban knows it can spout to provoke anti-Western sentiment among its sympathizers, and the reality is that this one young girl was threatening to destabilize their power.