• Go to Newsweek and The Daily Beast’s Women in the World Foundation to see how you can get involved with groups that help women and girls around the globe  get educated and escape violent homes.

• Oxfam works on the ground in Pakistan specifically to end violence and discrimination against women and girls. The group recruits local Pakistani men and women to commit to being “change makers” who reform negative attitudes and behavior, and encourage others to do the same.

• At Women for Women International, you can sponsor a woman survivor of war for a year. For $30 a month, you’ll help her learn job skills and improve her life—and you can get to know her through exchanging personal letters.

Meanwhile, outside her hospital room and across Pakistan, there is a sense of anger—and of déjà vu.

The brazen attack on the lovable teenager has shaken the country down to its core, sparking many rallies in her support. Meanwhile, in Pakistan’s electronic and print media, the outrage is aptly pouring out. Even religious talk show hosts are discussing how such a crime has nothing to do with Islam.

And, now we are a nation rent with the pain of a 14-year-old girl, attacked for daring to seek an education against the edict of terrorists.

If only that were true. Hundreds of girls’ schools have been destroyed without much of a concerted response from Pakistan’s officials. The intimidation of women and girls in the northern province is so complete that few venture out freely. Traditional Pashtun support for the education of daughters has been undermined by threats against their fathers. Not so long ago, even mullahs were increasingly sending their own girls to schools, segregated but still offering a chance of literacy.

The government that has decried this assassination attempt is the same government that began its career on the heels of the assassination of another female, its leader Benazir Bhutto. Both Bhutto and Yousafzai are symbols of the serious malaise afflicting Pakistan today. A country that could produce a female prime minister, but not protect her, is shown to be once again supportive of female education but unwilling and thus unable to keep in check the dark forces of Taliban terror pulling the country into a future where girls are ignorant, uneducated, and living as less than second-class citizens.

I posed this question to the class: would young Malala's spirit of enlightened Islamic interpretation prevail over the spades—the hardcore Pakistani militants and ideologues fueled by an extremist, dogmatic interpretation of Islam? I will admit I was hopeful. And then, this week, the very same 14-year-old girl was targeted by the forces of violence. She was shot in the head by members of the Pakistani Taliban, on a school bus. Her crime: pursuing an education for herself, and for others. The Taliban proudly defended their assault, with verses from the Quran.

The assassination attempt is disturbing beyond words, and deeply personal to me. I have relatives in Pakistan; the country has been inextricably woven into my life. I was born in India to a Muslim family, but many of my relatives moved to Pakistan after the nation was created in 1947 from the split of British India into two countries. My friend Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan in 2002 when he was staying at a house I’d rented. I conceived a child in Pakistan while unmarried, making me a criminal according to that country’s religious laws. In the U.S., I put my son, now 9, on a school bus every morning, and I wonder how the secular dreams of Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, have devolved into the targeted shooting of children on school buses.

Yousafzai (a common tribal name among the Pashtun, both in Swat and in my native Afghanistan) was airlifted from Mingora to Peshawar’s Combined Military Hospital. Bashir Bilour, the chief minister of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, spoke to reporters outside the hospital, denouncing the attacks as inhuman and un-Islamic. The girl’s condition seemed to be stable, he said, and she was responsive when doctors asked that she show her tongue and blink her eyes.

Nevertheless, he said, the next 10 days will be critical. After examining her thoroughly, the medical team informed the government that a bullet was lodged in her neck and was moving slowly toward her spinal cord. At this point swelling in her skull makes surgery impossible, the doctors say: the best chance of saving her life is to put her aboard an air ambulance and send her out of the country for expert treatment.