Decline of tourism
It is still possible to re-invigorate tourism in Swat and elsewhere in the country, but that needs political will.

Swat has enormous potential for tourism. It is more accessible than Gilgit-Baltistan, is home to a vast range of historic artefacts, and between 1988 and 2004 tourism was a backbone industry. Today, not only is tourism stumbling year-on-year but local people say that the government has no interest in preserving and maintaining the very cultural objects and sites that bring in the tourists in the first place. Some of them are simply decaying and neglected; others are being wilfully destroyed by those who see them as relics of an idolatrous past. What the Taliban have not desecrated, natural disasters such as the floods of 2010 — which destroyed about 128 hotels — have. It is still possible to re-invigorate tourism in Swat and elsewhere in the country, but that needs political will, something difficult to find in these distracted days.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 29th, 2014.
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