[A well-developed offer
came from former Representative Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark E.
Kelly, who had gone through their own treatment ordeal after she was shot in
the head last year. They had gone as far as to line up a noted neurosurgeon and
had even arranged a transportation option of their own to the United States —
with a television celebrity offering to quietly foot the fuel bill.]
By Declan Walsh
Whatever they chose, a
medical jet from the United Arab Emirates was waiting to take her to hospitals
abroad. Pakistani and American officials had talked about arranging treatment
for her at the giant American military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany.
A well-developed offer
came from former Representative Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark E.
Kelly, who had gone through their own treatment ordeal after she was shot in
the head last year. They had gone as far as to line up a noted neurosurgeon and
had even arranged a transportation option of their own to the United States —
with a television celebrity offering to quietly foot the fuel bill.
Those were among dozens
of offers from across the world. But when the time came to fly the wounded
schoolgirl out of Pakistan, in the early hours of Monday, a deal fromBritain to
accept Malala at a specialized hospital in Birmingham proved hard to beat.
But first, to get her
there.
Out of worry that the
Taliban would fulfill their promise to take a second shot at the teenage
activist, the dawn run from the military hospital in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, to
the airport was shrouded in secrecy, said Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s interior
minister.
“I directed the airport
staff to remain incognito, because there was an alert, threats from the Taliban
that they would kill her,” he said. “We were very careful.”
When the Emirati jet
carrying her and a team of doctors landed in Birmingham on Monday afternoon,
most agreed that the decision made both medical and diplomatic sense.
Britain and Pakistan
have a long history stretching back to British rule on the subcontinent;
doctors at the hospital, the Queen Elizabeth II Memorial Center, have treated
hundreds of British soldiers wounded in fighting against the Taliban in
southern Afghanistan.
“We do, unfortunately,
have a considerable expertise in treating that sort of bullet injury,” Dr.
David Rosser, the hospital’s medical director, told reporters.
Pakistani, British and
American officials took pains on Monday to emphasize that the final decision
about Ms. Yousafzai’s treatment had been based on medical grounds above all
else.
“We never saw this in a
political light,” one senior American official said on the condition of
anonymity. “This was a humanitarian story, not a political one.”
Yet there was little
doubt that each of the possibilities, especially given the diplomatic tensions
between Pakistan and America, carried its own political risk.
Initially, Pakistani
officials had approached the American Embassy for help, officials from both
countries said.
Two options were
discussed, Interior Minister Malik said: the possible use of an American
military facility in Oman, and evacuation to the Landstuhl Regional Medical
Center in Germany. “We scrambled like hell,” one American official said. “We
were standing by, ready to do anything.”
There were also private
American offers — from Ms. Giffords and Mr. Kelly, plus at least three other
“serious” parties, the American official added. One came from an American
businessman with ties to senior figures in the Pakistan government; another
came from a constituent of Senator John Kerry, who has longstanding political
ties to the country.
Meanwhile Ms. Giffords’s
doctor, Dr. Dong Kim, the head of neurosurgery at the Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center,
got ready to travel to Pakistan. Mr. Kelly, a former astronaut, said he had
recruited an American celebrity, whom he declined to name, to finance the fuel
costs of an emergency plane trip from Peshawar to Houston.
“We were just trying to
offer the best help available, as we understand it from being down this road,”
Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Kelly also pressed
political contacts in the White House, State Department and Pakistan to help
push the offer through. He said that Johns Hopkins University made a similar offer.
But over the weekend,
Mr. Kelly was told by a senior State Department official that “Pakistan has
decided to solve this domestically.”
The British connection,
however, had already been well established at that point through two doctors,
both experts in trauma injuries and one of whom was of Pakistani descent, who
happened to be visiting Pakistan at the time of the shooting last week.
The medics were quickly
drafted into the effort to save Ms. Yousafzai’s life. They were flown to
Peshawar to help with the initial diagnosis and then on to the hospital in
Rawalpindi. They shared in decisions about how long to keep the patient in
Pakistan, officials from Britain and Pakistan said, declining to name the two.
Early Monday morning,
the medics accompanied a Pakistani brigadier in watching over Ms. Yousafzai
during the flight to Britain. The air ambulance that ferried them had been
offered by the United Arab Emirates, a country with close political ties to
President Asif Ali Zardari.
By several accounts
there were sound medical reasons why the American offers of help to Ms.
Yousafzai were not accepted, including the lengthier flight to the United
States.
But Britain may also
have held other attractions. While the United States and Pakistan have engaged
in diplomatic warfare in recent years — over the Osama bin Laden raid, drone
strikes and the controversy surrounding the Central Intelligence Agency contractor
Raymond Davis — Britain has carefully cultivated a less adversarial
relationship.
Britain has been a major
aid donor to Pakistan for decades, and many high-ranking Pakistanis, in
political life and in the country’s armed forces, have been educated or trained
in Britain.
“If we had an offer of
British help and American help, all things being equal we would go with the
British,” one senior Pakistani official said. “It makes more sense.”
Exact details of Ms.
Yousafzai’s condition remain hazy. Doctors say she requires treatment for a
serious skull fracture, caused by a bullet that passed through her head. Later,
she may require long-term neurological rehabilitation.
Dr. Rosser, the hospital
director, said his doctors would make a full assessment after carrying out a
series of diagnostic tests, including neurosurgical imaging to determine the
extent of the injury to her brain.
Ms. Yousafzai’s
schoolmaster father, Ziauddin, who inspired her to start her high-profile
campaign for girls’ education and women’s rights in 2009, did not travel with
her to Birmingham yesterday, Pakistani officials said.
His passport had
expired, and had to be renewed on an emergency basis. He and his wife are to
arrive at their daughter’s bedside over the coming days.
Adam B. Ellick contributed reporting from
Cambridge, Mass., and John F. Burns from London.
