The vulnerability of education

The attack on Bacha Khan University at Charsadda is having far-reaching effects, none of them unexpected. The purpose of a terrorist attack is to frighten the population under attack, to intimidate them in some respect, and to change their behaviours. Across the country, the majority of government schools and educational institutions are lacking in security arrangements and are vulnerable to attack. This is according to the police who in the wake of the Army Public School attack sent questionnaires to all private schools across the land and required them to review and upgrade their security facilities. Most did, but some were prosecuted for failure to comply. There was no such stringency with government schools, and beyond a raising of walls in many but not all, they remain at risk and considering the TTP predilection for soft targets, there is cause for concern for the safety of millions of children as it is unknown where terror will strike next.

In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, parents have been keeping their children away from school since the attack, and rumours run like wildfire through communities. The police are in a real dilemma. To deploy sufficient police to provide protection to government schools would mean taking many thousands of them from other duties — an unsustainable option. The federal government has allocated Rs7.5 billion to enhance government school protection but even that is probably little more than a drop in the ocean. All the advice and diligence aimed at protecting children and older students is not worth a hill of beans unless there is an effective counter to the narrative of terror espoused by those that would bring down the system of governance as well as all the education within it — education at every level being anathemous to them. As has been made clear in these columns innumerable times in the last three years, unless there is a concerted effort to erode and defuse the mindset that is the glue that holds together the fabric of terror, then attacks such as that at Bacha Khan will continue. Terrorism is only successful if it is allowed to be.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 23^rd,  2016.

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