EDITORIAL: Some unidentified men torched a girls’ middle school in Razmak region of North Waziristan on Tuesday night, damaging its building and destroying all of its furniture, computers and other property. This was the third such attack this month.
On May 9, a private girls’ school in Shawa area of South Waziristan was set on fire by the so-called Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorists. Later on May 17, an under-construction school was bombed in Lower South Waziristan.
Fortunately, unlike some previous incidents no one was killed in these assaults. Ironically, this has been happening at a time Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has declared an education emergency, vowing to enroll some 26.2 million out-of-school children. Although the devastated structures are expected to be rebuilt soon, the threats of violence can easily disincentive students and their teachers to go back to school, and their parents to send them there.
Like their ideological brothers ruling Afghanistan, who have shut down girls’ secondary schools and banned young women from acquiring college and university education, Pakistani Taliban have a thing about girls and women’s education.
Before they were ousted in a military operation and fled to Afghanistan, TTP militants had destroyed hundreds of schools in the erstwhile tribal areas as well as settled districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP). They had also targeted teachers and students.
Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in 2012 along with some other girls in her hometown of Swat while on the way to school, luckily survived to become a famous advocate for female education. The recent surge in attacks affirms what is known though not officially acknowledged, that the militants have secured a foothold in their previous bastion in tribal districts of KP by dint of a dubious agreement, brokered by the Afghan Taliban, under which they were allowed to return from Afghanistan to be integrated into this society. Instead, they used the concession to regroup and restart fighting to seize control of KP’s tribal districts and impose their regressive ideology.
Our brave soldiers are regularly carrying out intelligence-based operations against these enemies of the state and its people. Part of the problem is across the border from where the TTP leaders orchestrate their militants’ nefarious activities.
The Kabul government not only ignores Islamabad’s repeated requests either to rein in the TTP terrorists or hand them over to it, but refuses to admit that they are in Afghanistan. Sooner or later the ongoing military operations will eliminate them, but the radicalisation they have engendered may well remain a source of trouble.
A further compounding factor is the state’s tolerance for certain religious extremist groups. All forms and manifestations of violent extremism must be stamped out for their deleterious effects on this country’s political stability and progress.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
Comments
Comments are closed.