Educating girls in Pakistan’s tribal regions helps blunt violent extremism
TOM ABKE and JACOB DOYLE
Marium Mukhtiar rose from her bunk at 5:30 on the morning of November 24, 2015. A pioneer among Pakistani women, Mukhtiar was one of the first to take to the skies as a female pilot in the Pakistan Air Force (PAF). After completing her mission briefing and eating breakfast at the M.M. Alam Air Base in Mianwali in northern Pakistan, she fastened her flight helmet over her hijab and joined her instructor-pilot, Squadron Leader Saqib Abbasi, aboard a K-8P, a two-seat, intermediate jet trainer and light attack aircraft. A thin haze and gentle winds offered no sign of concern for that morning’s routine training flight.
Flying over the nearby town of Kundian, however, the plane encountered “a serious technical problem,” according to PAF reports. As the K-8P rapidly lost altitude, it became clear that the pilots had to eject. Abbasi did so and parachuted safely down. But Mukhtiar chose to wait, staying at the controls until the aircraft was no longer over a population center. When she finally did eject, she was too close to the ground for the parachute to slow her fall.
In the year since her fatal crash at the age of 23, Marium has become a national heroine known affectionately by her first name and a symbol of what women can achieve in Pakistan with the benefits of education and training.
She hoped that her achievement would be appreciated by others, she added, and that they would think of their “sisters and daughters” and encourage them to follow her example by pursuing their dreams.
While the Pakistani public pays tribute to Marium, statistics show that she remains a relative rarity in the country. For example, according to UNESCO, Pakistan’s female literacy rate is 43 percent, far behind the 70 percent of Pakistani men who are literate. Experts have noted a correlation, particularly in rural districts, between low levels of education and susceptibility to violent extremism. Advocates for female education insist it will create a country that is more stable, prosperous and tolerant and less prone to terrorist recruitment.
“Some girls are opting for professions that would not have been possible a decade ago,” said Zehra Kaneez, national coordinator for Pakistan Coalition for Education, in an interview with Unipath. “So this is the bright side.”
Kaneez cited examples not only of female fighter pilots, but also of a female mountaineer and deep sea diving instructor, all of whom have received media attention.
“On the other side, we have Malala,” Kaneez added. Malala Yousafzai, a 13-year-old girl in the Swat Valley of northwest Pakistan, was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 after gaining fame for her blog advocating girls’ education in the face of Taliban hostility. Malala went on to recover and receive a portion of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.
“So there are two very strong positions on opposite sides,” Kaneez said, referring to those opposed to girls’ education and those who favor it. “We need a balanced society, which education can bring.”
Numerous initiatives to promote girls’ education throughout Pakistan have been rolled out in recent years involving the government of Pakistan, the United Nations, the World Bank and international donors such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which pledged $70 million in 2015 to advance education in Pakistan as part of the Let Girls Learn initiative.
“Educated girls become women who strengthen their families, communities, and countries,” USAID Acting Administrator Alfonso E. Lenhardt said in a prepared statement. “By increasing access to educational opportunities during the critical time of adolescence, this important initiative will be transformative for Pakistan, empowering young women to overcome barriers and lift themselves out of poverty.”
One program partly supported by USAID, the Promoting Girls’ Education in Balochistan Project (PGEB), has brought education to over 33,000 girls since 2010, according to the World Bank. The initiative, explained Kaneez, provides tangible evidence that educating girls can benefit communities.
“In one jurisdiction of Balochistan, which is a poor religious area, they found that when women are finding jobs, then families see to it that girls are taught, so in this way education becomes valued for girls,” said Kaneez. “These are the experiences that show that when education is associated with prosperity, then people will want their daughters to have it.”
As societies begin valuing educated women, marital and child-rearing habits have also been affected.
Some 65 percent of Pakistan’s population lives in rural areas, and it is there that girls’ education is at its lowest levels, according to data from Pakistan’s Ministry of Education. The districts with the most rural populations, Balochistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), have also seen the most activity by the Taliban, a terrorist group that follows a radical interpretation of Islam that strictly opposes education for all females.
As part of PGEB’s efforts to expand girls’ education in Balochistan, it has prioritized hiring female teachers from within the district’s communities, thereby “creating a new role model for girls and influencing perceptions about women’s role in the community.”
In FATA, the home district of Malala, efforts by her nonprofit, the Malala Fund, have focused on enabling vulnerable and married girls to get a quality, post-primary education and on providing educational programming and “psycho-social support” to children displaced by Taliban-inspired violence in the region.
In Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous district, some of the greatest progress has been made. The families of 380,000 girls in Punjab’s government schools, grades six to 10, have received cash stipends to improve enrollment and retention, according to Dr. Madiha Nezfal, assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy in the U.S.
Stipends help defray the cost to families of accompanying students to school, as well as other expenses such as books and uniforms, Nezfal explained. “Poor families tend to educate the child that promises the highest return, so they tend to choose boys. With girls, there are fewer economic opportunities later on. So, it’s not that they don’t want to educate their daughters. They do. Polls and in-depth interviews spell this out,” she said.
Muhammad Khalid Awan, senior counterterrorism investigator with Interpol in Pakistan, affirmed the importance of educating girls and women in the effort to end violent extremism, but emphasized that it is just part of a larger set of challenges.
“It is true that education, especially women’s education, plays a very important role in the development of a good and educated society,” Awan said. “Not only women’s education, but education for both men and women is extremely important for a civilized, well-behaved and peaceful society.”
Awan added that violent extremism also stems from poverty, unemployment and an unbalanced distribution of resources.
Nezfal’s fieldwork in Pakistan has, however, demonstrated correlations between low education levels and greater sympathy for extremist narratives, as well as revealing the need for certain qualitative changes in the national education curriculum.
“If you have a solid education where you learn to question things, where you are able to distinguish between what’s false, what’s a conspiracy theory and what’s factual, this reduces your sympathy for extremist groups,” Nezfal told Unipath. “But in Pakistan, it’s not clear that the curriculum of the government education helps develop those abilities. Since it doesn’t do that, for both boys and girls, it doesn’t really help them to counter some of the narratives associated with violent extremism.”
Nezfal explained that her interviews with high school students revealed a greater sympathy for extremism than did interviews with university students. She credited the difference to an exposure to critical thinking, which is taught in Pakistan’s universities and private high schools. Such instruction is largely lacking in most government primary and secondary schools, which instead focus “more on rote memorization of textbooks in preparation for exams.”
Pakistan’s elite, she added, tend to be educated in private schools, as she was, before attending a university in the United States. In many of Pakistan’s private schools, students are exposed to a curriculum that emphasizes discussion and essay writing, rather than focusing on exams. Reforms in this direction are at least ostensibly favored by Pakistan’s Ministry of Education, Nezfal said, but for now the primary goal is to improve access to safe and stable schools, with particular emphasis on extending education to girls.
Despite challenges, pronouncements by advocates such as Malala and the Ministry of Education about the goals and progress of education for women and girls have produced an air of optimism, a feeling echoed by the late fighter pilot Marium Mukhtiar a year before her fatal crash.
“Most of the people think that Pakistan has very large restrictions for women. But I want to say, no, it’s not like that,” Marium said. “They should come to Pakistan and see what Pakistan is actually doing.”
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