"The Russian invasion transformed [Pakistan's general] Zia from an international pariah to the great defender of freedom in the Cold War. The Americans became friends with us once again, as in those days Russia was their main enemy. Next door to us the Shah of Iran had been overthrown in a revolution a few months earlier, so the CIA had lost their main base in the region. Pakistan took its place. Billions of dollars flowed into our exchequer from the United States and other Western countries, as well as weapons to help the ISI train the Afghans to fight the communist Red Army. General Zia was invited to meet President Ronald Reagan at the White House and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street. They lavished praise on him.
[...]
We Pashtuns are split between Pakistan and Afghanistan and don’t really recognize the border that the British drew more than 100 years ago. So our blood boiled over the Soviet invasion for both religious and nationalist reasons.
[...]
My father says that in our part of the world this idea of jihad was very much encouraged by the CIA.
[...]
At that time my father was only twelve years old and too young to fight. But the Russians ended up stuck in Afghanistan for ten years, through most of the 1980s, and when he became a teenager my father decided he too wanted to be a jihadi. Though later he became less regular in his prayers, in those days he used to leave home at dawn every morning to walk to a mosque in another village, where he studied the Quran with a senior talib. At that time talib simply meant “religious student.”
[...]
Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, had been living in Kandahar when the attack on the World Trade Center happened, and the Americans had sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan to catch him and overthrow the Taliban regime which had protected him. In Pakistan we were still under a dictatorship, but America needed our help, just as it had in the 1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Just as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had changed everything for General Zia, so 9/11 transformed General Musharraf from an international outcast. Suddenly he was being invited to the White House by George W. Bush and to 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair. There was a major problem, however. Our own [Pakistani] intelligence service ISI had virtually created the Taliban. Many ISI officers were close to its leaders, having known them for years, and shared some of their beliefs.
[...]
[M]any Pashtuns did not like the bombing of Afghanistan or the way Pakistan was helping the Americans, even if it was only by allowing them to cross our airspace and stopping weapon supplies to the Taliban.
[...]
Musharraf told our people that he had no choice but to cooperate with the Americans. He said they had told him “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” and threatened to “bomb us back to the Stone Age” if we stood against them. But we weren’t exactly cooperating, as the ISI was still arming Taliban fighters and giving their leaders sanctuary in Quetta. They even persuaded the Americans to let them fly hundreds of Pakistani fighters out of northern Afghanistan. The ISI chief asked the Americans to hold off their attack on Afghanistan until he had gone to Kandahar to ask the Taliban leader Mullah Omar to hand over bin Laden; instead he offered the Taliban help.
[...]
The governor of our province issued a statement that anyone who wanted to fight in Afghanistan against NATO forces was free to do so. Some 12,000 young men from Swat went to help the Taliban. Many never came back. They were most likely killed, but as there is no proof of death, their wives can’t be declared widows. It’s very hard on them.
[...]
Anyone could see that Musharraf was double-dealing, taking American money while still helping the jihadis—“strategic assets,” as the ISI calls them. The Americans say they gave Pakistan billions of dollars to help their campaign against al-Qaeda, but we didn’t see a single cent. Musharraf built a mansion by Rawal Lake in Islamabad and bought an apartment in London.
[...]
On 17 June 2004 an unmanned Predator dropped a Hellfire missile on Nek Mohammad in South Waziristan [Pakistan], apparently while he was giving an interview by satellite phone. He and the men around him were killed instantly. Local people had no idea what it was—back then we did not know that the Americans could do such a thing. Whatever you thought about Nek Mohammad, we were not at war with the Americans and were shocked that they would launch attacks from the sky on our soil. Across the tribal areas people were angry and many joined militant groups or formed lashkars, local militias. Then there were more attacks. The Americans said that bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri was hiding in Bajaur and had taken a wife there. In January 2006 a drone supposedly targeting him landed on a village called Damadola, destroying three houses and killing eighteen people. The Americans said he had been tipped off and escaped. That same year, on 30 October, another US Predator hit a madrasa on a hill near the main town of Khar, killing eighty-two people, many of them young boys. The Americans said it was the al-Qaeda training camp which had featured in the group’s videos and that the hill was riddled with tunnels and gun emplacements. Within a few hours of the attack, an influential local cleric called Faqir Mohammad, who had run the madrasa, announced that the deaths would be avenged by suicide bombings against Pakistani soldiers.
[...]
At first we assumed our government had known and been involved in the American operation [to kill Bin Laden]. But we soon found out that the Americans had gone it alone. This didn’t sit well with our people. We were supposed to be allies and we had lost more soldiers in their War on Terror than they had. They had entered the country at night, flying low and using special quiet helicopters, and had blocked our radar with electronic interference. They had only announced their mission to the army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, and President Zardari after the event. Most of the army leadership learned about it on TV. The Americans said they had no choice but to do it like that because no one really knew which side the ISI was on and someone might have tipped off bin Laden before they reached him.
[...]
In Washington the government of President Obama had just announced it was sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan to turn around the war against the Taliban. But now they seemed to be more alarmed about Pakistan than Afghanistan. Not because of girls like me and my school but because our country has more than 200 nuclear warheads and they were worried about who was going to control them. They talked about stopping their billions of dollars in aid and sending troops instead. At the start of May our [Pakistani] army launched Operation True Path to drive the Taliban out of Swat. We heard they were dropping hundreds of commandos from helicopters into the mountains in the north. More troops appeared in Mingora too. This time they would clear the town. They announced over megaphones that all residents should leave.
[...]
As we crossed the Malakand Pass I saw a young girl selling oranges. She was scratching marks on a scrap of paper with a nail to account for the oranges she had sold, as she could not read or write. I took a photo of her and vowed I would do everything in my power to help educate girls just like her. This was the war I was going to fight."
-A history lesson from Malala Yousefzai, from her book "I am Malala"