In October 2012 two girls were wounded in two different armed actions in the north-western reaches of Pakistan. The first victim was Malala Yousafzai, the recent Nobel Prize recipient. The lesser known girl is Nabila ur-Rehman, then eight years old. Nabila was shot at by a CIA-operated drone while picking okra in a field near her home and Malala by the Taliban. Six of Nabila’s siblings were also shot and her grandmother killed in the attack.

It’s not surprising that we heard of Malala repeatedly since that fateful October but did not, until much later, find out about Nabila. Malala’s story fit her Western storyteller’s preferred narrative of the white man’s burden. That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be applauded — very few of us would stand up for our rights when faced with a man holding a gun. But Nabila was no less brave.

Missing in news Exactly a year after the attack, Nabila, her father and her brother made the long, much-less publicised trek to Washington DC for a congressional hearing on the drone attack on children playing in an okra field. The hearing, Al Jazeera had reported, was attended by five out of 430 representatives.

There’s the even lesser known story of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, who was 14 when she was gang-raped by four US soldiers in Iraq. The rape ended in Abeer’s parents and younger sister being killed before she herself was set on fire. (All four soldiers, and a fifth, who acted as a lookout, have since been convicted.)

Nabila and Abeer were unfortunate in that they were the wrong kind of victims; their perpetrators were the supposed good guys. So these two girls, and no doubt the countless others we will never know about, are simply collateral damage in what Barack Obama described as a “just war” in his 2009 Nobel peace prize acceptance speech.

Celebrating Malala’s courage to the exclusion of all others — in fact, refusing to even acknowledge child victims of the other kind — is an insult to girls such as Nabila and Abeer. Their names don’t trend on Twitter now, nor will history remember them when the final record of these wars is written.

A burden for her But the greater injustice is possibly to Malala herself. A peace prize to a 17-year-old? My God, what kind of obligations are we burdening her with?

Most likely her life will turn into something like a perverse and unending reality TV show, with every personal choice – from her taste in music to what she does with herself for the rest of her life – scrutinised and judged and held up for inspection against the Nobel. Malala says she wants to be a “good politician” when she grows up, which is wonderful except that politics in both present-day Pakistan and the UK isn’t exactly welcoming of Muslim women with little political pedigree or lacking the support of powerful families. Besides, by thrusting these images on a teenager, we forget that she is perfectly entitled to a quiet life back in Swat, teaching at a local school and bringing up her children.

If that is her choice, or something else just as prosaic and peaceful, would the Nobel still be justified? Or would be wince at our hastiness?

Even one wrong move on her part could turn her adulatory audience into shrill critics.

Malala is child; a brave child, but still a child. And using her to ease our conscience is simply not done.

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