BIRMINGHAM, United Kingdom: A 14-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban has a chance of making a “decent recovery”, said a doctor at the British hospital where she was airlifted on Monday.

Malala Yousafzai was attacked on her school bus in the former Taliban stronghold of the Swat valley on Tuesday as a punishment for campaigning for the right to an education.

She was flown into Birmingham Airport in central England on Monday before being taken to the nearby Queen Elizabeth Hospital for specialist treatment.

Hospital Medical Director Da-vid Rosser said that British colleagues working in Pakistan believed that she had “a chance of making a good recovery”.

“Clearly it would be inappropriate on every level, not least for her, to put her through all of this if there was no hope of decent recovery,” he told reporters.

But Rosser warned that Malala faces a long road to recovery.

“Our experience with battle casualties, and you can deal with her as a battle casualty from a physiological point of view, is that patients need lots of different specialities,” he said.

The hospital is a highly specialized facility where British soldiers, seriously wounded in Afghanistan, are treated.

Doctors in Pakistan said that Malala needs treatment for a damaged skull and “intensive neuro-rehabilitation”.

Security concerns meant Malala’s departure after daybreak from Islamabad Airport—in an air ambulance provided by the United Arab Emirates—was not announced until the plane was airborne.

Malala, who had been treated in a Pakistani military hospital, was accompanied on the plane by an intensive care specialist.

The shooting has been denounced worldwide and by Pakistan, which has said that it will do everything possible to ensure Malala recovers and will meet all the costs of her treatment.

The cold-blooded murder attempt has sickened Pakistan, where Malala came to prominence with a blog for the BBC highlighting atrocities under the hardline Islamist Taliban, who terrorized the Swat valley from 2007 until an army offensive in 2009.

Activists say that the shooting should be a wake-up call to those who advocate appeasement with the Taliban, but analysts suspect that there will be no significant change in a country that has sponsored radical Islam for decades.

Right-wing and conservative religious leaders have refrained from publicly denouncing the Taliban. They have warned the government against using the attack on Malala as a pretext for an offensive in the militant bastion of North Waziristan.

The United States has long called on Pakistan to wage an operation in the district, considered the leadership base of the Haqqani network—blamed for some of the deadliest attacks in Afghanistan—as well as a Taliban stronghold.