The poem reads in part:

A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe—
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
Comprised in "villanous saltpetre!"
And after—ask the Yusufzaies
What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—
The Crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

No proposition Euclid wrote,
No formulae the text-books know,
Will turn the bullet from your coat,
Or ward the tulwar's downward blow
Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can—
The odds are on the cheaper man.

Ever since the War on Terror started, I have found a lot of Kipling's stuff frightfully (or depressingly) relevant. Among many other things I have read, "The Afghan Campaign," Stephen Pressfield's novel of a soldier in Alexander's army, suggests, though no doubt consciously in regard to contemporary events, that not much changes in the region, but the ideas and feelings evoked by Kipling's work, more than a hundred years old, really speak to that notion.

"Arithmetic on the Frontier" is making a similar point as the Major General's Song from Pirates of Penzance, albeit in a less annoying fashion, regarding the education and training stressed in the military, often (in the minds of the writers, at least) at the expense of practical combat skills. It's as if they were trying to buck the trends of the time which were so optimistically embracing Progress and Science and Industry and how those would solve all ills that had plagued the less enlightened ages.

Yet, in the experience of those on the "sharp end" (or at least inclined to skewer commonly held ideas for a laugh), simple barbarism has its advantages as well.

Maybe it reflects some sort of universal truth, in more than simply military affairs, that the same sort of thing happened here - her education and technological access really did nothing more than make her a target, and by the reaction of the students to the school name issue, the barbarians won this round. She might be alive, but her good example has been squelched. She is no longer a role model held up for admiration, but a target to be avoided for fear of becoming collateral damage.

The Graveyard of Empires, into which entry seems to have presaged the ultimate crisis that has brought so many powers low over two millenia might just have repeated that feat with the boundary- & territory-less realm of the technological & egalitarian modern globalist society. Maybe the Internet's tendrils and social media revolutions will effect change in Iran and China. Maybe their illusory influence in the so-called Arab Spring of nearly two years ago will eventually become a reality. But the "nation" created by the Internet revolution seems to have encountered the same sorts of set-backs as the US, Russia & Britain experienced for all their confidence upon their initial penetration of Afghanistan.

In another of Kipling's poems, which is spoken as advice to a new British soldier, the speaker describes some of the hardships and privations of army life, and repeatedly advises the young soldier to suck it up, to not panic or get upset, to endure and carry on...like "a soldier,/Soldier of the Queen" At least until the last stanza:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains...

Some things are not to be endured, some things have no solution, as the speaker offers to the other scenarios he brings up. Anything else, you can live with or there is a solution to or it's just not worth panicing or making a fuss over. But not when you come smack up against the grassroots attitude of the Afghan. Then you're screwed, and might as well check out.

A lesson Malala seems to have learned, from her agreement with the students who wanted her name off their school.

Oh, and as a post-script:
Yes, I know this is all in Pakistan, so before the pedants on the site get all up in my grill...Her name and maybe her location (I'm not sure, but it seems like she might be from the FATA), suggest she's Pashtun, which is basically who they're talking about in the poems and such.