Khalid Aziz

Pakistan and the world needs to change its approach to secure women rights. What happened to Malala Yousafzai was a horrific act that shows that the Taliban will not hesitate to use terror as a weapon to create fear amongst the population. While the world has the option to choose its stories, we, in Pakistan, do not have that luxury. As in other wars, the most affected are the least protected and most vulnerable amongst the population: women and children. The blame doesn’t lie with one party alone. They are all culpable. The U.S. violates human rights in the region with drones which kill many innocents. The Pakistani military, while striving to clear the region, also humiliates and kills locals. Finally, the Taliban who want to wrest away the state from a legitimate but poorly managed government, also deploy violence. Pakistan is now paying the price for its involvement in Afghanistan. During the 1970s, about 5 million Afghan refugees entered Pakistan, a fourth of Afghanistan’s population. Many lived in camps and others merged into the Pakistani population. The first group of refugees included a large portion of Afghanistan’s rural elite who fled their country out of fear of arrest by […]