Saving Pakistan’s progeny

Children are the biggest victims of war and conflict in terms of the lost opportunity they represent for the future. This was proven again when the news surfaced of a nine-year-old girl, Sohana Javed, who was abducted from Peshawar and forced into becoming a possible suicide bomber in Lower Dir. Initial reports reveal remarkable presence of mind on Sohana’s part when, seeing an opportunity, she ran away from her captors and sought help from the Frontier Corps personnel at a nearby check-post—the alleged target of her attack. This incident has revealed a possible shift in the strategy of the terrorist groups who, till now, had relied primarily on men and teenage boys to carry out their attacks. It has also highlighted the lengths to which the militants will resort in carrying out their agenda with no regard of the universal and Islamic principle of safeguarding children from acts of war.

In the recent years, there has been a marked difference in the profile of would-be suicide bombers with a decrease in their age. There are various reasons behind the relative effortlessness with which the militants have been able to not only recruit but also brainwash teenagers into becoming suicide bombers. First, teens are still the formative years of people’s lives which is why they can be radicalized more quickly than those older. Umari Fidai, the failed teenage suicide bomber at the Sakhi Sarwar shrine in April 2011, confirmed this when he revealed that his recruitment, indoctrination and training period spanned just over five months. Second, and less explored, reason for the militants’ success is the type of education given in the public schools and madaris (religious seminaries).

The shamble state of Pakistan’s education system is on record. The Education Emergency Pakistan 2011 report recently published by The Pakistan Education Task Force puts the figures in clear, undeniable terms: one in every ten children in the world who is out of primary school lives in Pakistan. The 18^th Amendment to the constitution placed the responsibility of providing free and compulsory education to every Pakistani child between ages 5 and 16 on the government. This is a daunting goal considering the figures given by the education emergency report that there is only 23 percent of enrollment in secondary schools. Added to this, the dismal amount of money allocated to education in the provincial budgets, the disparity in access to education in different provinces, and the fact that Pakistan has no chance of meeting the pledged Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for education by 2015, the situation then seems abysmal at best.

However, the problem with the education sector extends beyond the education availability. Not enough attention has been given to the quality and nature of knowledge currently being provided to the students. There have been numerous reports in the past years about the intolerant subtext of the current education curricula of public schools. The idealization of jihad, the alienation of non-Muslims as the “other,” and misrepresentation of the country’s history has been grilled in the minds of our children. This sets the stage for the militants to affect the young minds with remarkable ease.

The 18^th Amendment has devolved the education sector to the provinces which provide the provincial governments an unprecedented opportunity to re-access the public school textbooks. The provincial governments have responded well so far in re-visiting the curricula of schools with Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa having already published some books with more to follow. The governments, however, must focus on the independence and credibility of such evaluation to ensure positive outcome of this challenging project.

What happened in Lower Dir was a fortunate failure of the militants. Sohana Javed was lucky her captors tried to use her as a suicide bomber as soon as they abducted her without spending any time to radicalize her beliefs. But there are numerous young boys, and now maybe girls, who are being indoctrinated either directly through preaching and training, or indirectly through the propaganda literature readily available especially in FATA and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. We need to remember that such radicalization is only possible because it reinforces and expands on the already prevalent prejudice being spewed out from public school textbooks.

Education reforms are a very daunting task for Pakistan which is battling a crippling internal conflict. But we will be at fault to fight back extremism only with force. In order to save Pakistan’s youth, which is the main recruitment target of Al Qaeda and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the provincial governments need to quicken the pace of reforming the structure of education and, more importantly, its content. Defence and infrastructure development expenditure will only yield its maximum benefit if it is supported by saving the minds of our future generations.