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LONDON — Pakistan’s National Assembly has unanimously passed the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill 2012, guaranteeing free education for all children between the ages of five and 16. This right was already enshrined in the Constitution, but it took this bill to articulate how it would be delivered. Under the new law, passed on Tuesday, parents who refuse to send their children to school can be fined and imprisoned for three months, and employers who hire school-age children face fines and up to six months in prison.

In a country with the world’s second-highest rate of out-of-school children, the bill is intended to signal an official commitment to universal literacy. But legislation alone never put anyone through school, and the law will be useless if the government does not take further action to implement it. At the same time, the law’s timing makes it seem more like a political calculation than a true commitment.

The law was passed just weeks after 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot by Taliban militants for championing girls’ right to education, and just months before the 2013 general elections. Yousafzai’s shooting horrified the country: On Nov. 10, Pakistanis celebrated “Malala Day” by signing petitions urging the government to pay stipends to parents who educate their daughters. Now the government is trying to piggyback on public support for Yousafzai’s cause by supporting children’s right to education.

But politicizing the nation’s education policy is a bad idea, especially in light of Pakistan’s appalling statistics: Twenty-five million children are currently out of school, including seven million who have yet to receive any form of primary schooling. Infrastructure is inadequate: Only 62 percent of public schools have toilets and only 39 percent have electricity.

There are some 25,000 so-called ghost schools in Pakistan — schools that exist on paper but are used for other purposes, including as cattle pens, criminal gang headquarters, sanctuaries for drug addicts or armories. Thousands of ghost teachers draw salaries from these schools, draining millions of rupees per month from government coffers.

Recent natural disasters and the ever-deteriorating security situation have exacerbated the situation. Summer floods over the past three years have damaged schools and displaced families, accounting for keeping 1.8 million children out of school. Meanwhile, in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Taliban militants have destroyed 710 schools, and up to 600,000 children have missed one or more years of education because of to poor security.

Above all, Pakistan will not meet the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals in education — 88 percent literacy and 100 percent enrollment in primary school by 2015 — because of low government spending. Only 2.3 percent of Pakistan’s 2012-13 budget is allocated to education, compared with 18.4 percent of gross domestic product for defense.

The Pakistan Education Task Force concluded last year that the government would have to spend an extra 100 billion rupees, or about $1 billion, each year to meet its long-term educational goals. And civil society groups have repeatedly called for a minimum education expenditure of 4 percent of G.D.P. If the government really wants to honor Yusafzai’s cause, it’ll have to put its money where its legislation is.