When terrorists in Nigeria organized a secret attack last month,
they didn’t target an army barracks, a police department or a drone
base. No, Boko Haram militants attacked what is even scarier to a
fanatic: a girls’ school. That’s what extremists do. They target
educated girls, their worst nightmare.
– . That’s why the Pakistani Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head at age 15. That’s why the Afghan Taliban throws acid on the faces of girls who dare to seek an education.
Why
are fanatics so terrified of girls’ education? Because there’s no force
more powerful to transform a society. The greatest threat to extremism
isn’t drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.
In
that sense, Boko Haram was behaving perfectly rationally — albeit
barbarically — when it kidnapped some of the brightest, most ambitious
girls in the region and announced plans to sell them as slaves. If you
want to mire a nation in backwardness, manacle your daughters.
What
saddens me is that we in the West aren’t acting as rationally. To fight
militancy, we invest overwhelmingly in the military toolbox but not so
much in the education toolbox that has a far better record at defeating
militancy.
Please continue to read The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof‘s Op-Ed here.
Courtesy:TheNewAfrica
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