Targeting girls education: Pakistan’s tribal areas suffer under Taliban influence

Schools are the best weapon against extremism, that’s why the militants fear them.

A mass awareness campaign for girls education with the help of local leaders in the tribal belt should be launched (Farooq Naeem/AFP via Getty Images)

SYED FAZL-E-HAIDER
Published 14 May 2024 

The long, rugged border running along Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas that separates Afghanistan provides no barrier to the influence of the Taliban and its radical policies against women.

A private girls school was blown up on 8 May by unidentified militants in North Waziristan district, the former stronghold of the outlawed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban. It reflects the impact of the Taliban’s policy of banning girls' education in neighbouring Afghanistan. It was the only private girls school in the area. The school administration had received multiple threatening letters from the militants.

This was not the first attack on a girls school. Attackers targeted two government schools for girls in North Waziristan last year.

Since the takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban has banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade and banned women from university. Pakistani Taliban, who are ideologically closer to Afghan Taliban, are trying to enforce the a similar anti-education and theocratic agenda in Pakistan’s tribal areas by force.

Before the all-out military operation launched by Pakistan’s security forces in 2014, the TTP carried out hundreds of attacks on girls schools in the tribal areas and settled districts of the northwestern province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa from its stronghold in Swat district. Education was a casualty of the conflict between the militants and the state. The youngest ever Nobel laureate, Malala Yousafzai, was shot in the face at 14 by TTP gunmen in 2012. Malala was from Swat – her crime was that she wanted to pursue her education.

The military offensive may check the militants, but it cannot combat the growth of radical attitudes in the Pakistani tribal areas influenced by cross-border extremism.

More than 1,100 girls’ schools were destroyed in the tribal areas between 2007 to 2017, with teachers and young students also targeted. As a result of the military crackdown, TTP militants fled to Afghanistan and began to orchestrate cross border attacks from their new sanctuaries. The Taliban takeover of Kabul has emboldened the TTP, which is fighting to regain control of its strongholds in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

The 8 May bombing provoked strong condemnation from UNICEF, with the local country representative Abdullah Fadil calling the attack a severe setback to national progress. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif last week ordered that the girls school be immediately rebuilt and vowed to provide women with equal opportunities for education. But securing education for girls in the tribal areas has proven nigh to impossible, compounded as the Talibanisation of the region continues.

Pakistan’s security forces are carrying out operations against the militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa almost on a daily basis and have even launched airstrikes targeting TTP hideouts. But inside Afghanistan, the Taliban has ignored Islamabad's repeated requests for a crackdown on the TTP. Besides, the military offensive may check the militants, but it cannot combat the growth of radical attitudes in the Pakistani tribal areas influenced by cross-border extremism.

The government needs to adopt a broader approach. For instance, a mass awareness campaign for girls education with the help of local leaders in the tribal belt should be launched. Religious scholars could play a key role by highlighting the importance of girls education and the empowerment of women from Islamic point of view.

Those within the Taliban movement who stand apart from the Taliban’s anti-education and anti-women policies need to be encouraged and deserve international appreciation. For example, Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former senior Taliban official in Kabul, onetime ambassador to Islamabad, an early member of the Taliban, and former prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, has criticised the Taliban’s ban on female education. “Those who oppose modern education or invent arguments to undermine its importance, they are either completely ignorant or oppose Muslims under the garb of Islam,” he wrote on X on 5 March.

It is not the Taliban, but Talibanisation that is the real threat. Education is the most powerful weapon against such extremism. That’s why the extremists on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border are pursuing an anti-education agenda.