In the times we live in, dealing with alterations in settings for laptops, electronic notepads, mobiles, and other devices is a regular part of life. Many of us are accustomed to dialling the relevant number, dealing with the increasingly complex automated messages we hear, and then following, or at least attempting to follow, the series of instructions given out.
One wishes that changing the settings of minds was as simple a procedure. Unfortunately, it is not. An attempt to do so has been underway in Swat since the end of the military operation there against militants in 2009, with the military setting up a rehabilitation centre to re-educate 14 to 17-year-olds; a separate programme is run for older militant recruits.
Success is being claimed, but the true degree to which this has been achieved will become clear only with time. The degree of attention being given to the issue in Swat is however encouraging – with the COAS General Kayani recently emphasising the need to change minds at a seminar he addressed in Mingora and urging civil society to play a role in this.
The army chief did not, of course, go into the issue of the part played in the past by the military in building this line of thinking in the first place as part of its strategic planning – with the slogan of ‘jihad’ embedded everywhere in its training manuals and pamphlets.
But for all this, the efforts in Swat deserve praise. The key question we need to ask is why they are not being expanded further, beyond Swat and into areas like the Punjab – where extremism is spreading rapidly and has, in fact, already taken a deep hold. Experts believe it is here that the need for change is most urgent.
The ‘de-radicalisation’ initiative the COAS talks of needs to be extended beyond the rather limited confines of Swat. In the last few years, there has been a concentration of militancy in the province, with the Lashkar-e-Taiba – blamed for the Mumbai attacks – centred here, as are other forces such as those behind last year’s massacre of 90 Ahmadi worshippers in Lahore.
A retired army officer who overpowered one of the assailants at an Ahmadi place of worship described the absolute lack of expressions on the young man’s face as he went about his task of ending the lives of other human beings.
This has also been the experience of others who have had the misfortune to come face to face with the killers who have entered buildings and laid siege to them or detonated suicide jackets in crowded places.
Indoctrination, usually by promising deprived youngsters all the luxuries – including access to beautiful virgins – along with the drugs which are used to achieve this degree of emotional blank out, are obviously highly successful.
The experiment in Swat is reported to have been successful. Psychologists, Islamic scholars and teachers worked together to re-educate the boys. We must hope their efforts will continue over an extended period of time and will serve to rescue these young men from the trauma they have lived through.
The real question though is, how we are to carry out indoctrination on a far larger scale. The kind of centres set up in Swat may work for a small set of young, hard-core militants. But what we need is more sweeping change. If we had a magical instrument that could look into the minds of people, we would see dangerous ideas lurking in unexpected places.
Even those who present themselves as ‘liberals’ often support the Taliban in one way or the other, hostility towards India is engrained into young minds in schools and surprising levels of intolerance lie everywhere.
These factors prop up extremism as do the activities of many groups that operate with official approval, maintaining they are engaged only in preaching their message.
On campuses, forces such as the Islami Jamiat-e-Tulaba continue to make violent attempts to stamp their brand of morality everywhere, in the most recent incident at the Punjab University attacking male students who sat alongside their female peers.
Still worse are the nonsensical messages spouted by uneducated prayer leaders. A recording circulated over the Internet a few months ago gave a terrifying word-by-word account of a sermon by a cleric who told his audience in Khanewal of a dead woman emerging from her grave without her hair, her lips, and other miscellaneous body parts to narrate how she, in the after-life, had been punished for going unveiled, wearing make-up, and for other similar misdemeanours.
In Lahore’s mosques, Osama bin Laden has been hailed as a hero and those opposing blasphemy laws have been described as infidels.
We need a clear-cut policy which can be implemented at a very wide level to alter all this.
In the first place, the curriculum used at schools must be altered and the elements of hatred included within them, sometimes subtly and sometimes far more blatantly removed.
At the same time, the media needs to be persuaded to play a role in building tolerance rather than promoting extremist ideas. All this needs to be combined with strategies that can be used to combat the way people think and the ease with which they can lured away by militants.
This means the creation of employment opportunities and also a more equitable society which allows opportunities to all based on merit rather than on class or influence.
It is not enough to limit efforts to Swat. The campaign against extremism in that area has to be combined with an effort at the national level to bring about genuine change in the lives of people and to eradicate the messages that have been used with devious intent to warp their manner of thinking.
The attempts being made in Swat to rehabilitate militants must also be replicated elsewhere so that guns can be replaced with less menacing implements that do not bring death or play havoc with lives. This task must be begun immediately. It has been neglected long enough already.
Copyright TheNews 14.7.2011
