A good omen for education in Balochistan, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal areas: the Pakistan Army has launched a number of educational projects for the youth during the past decade in these regions of the country. It has not only established schools and colleges but also technical and industrial institutes in Balochistan, besides giving military training to the youth.
Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, realising the gravity of the situation in the insurgency-plagued areas of the country, ordered the launching of special economic and educational projects. As Balochistan has become a centre of activity of international anti-Pakistan forces recently, the Pakistan Army is obviously paying special attention to this province. General Kayani allotted 10,000 vacancies for the youth of Balochistan in 2009-2011, and announced additional 5,000 vacancies for enrolment in 2012.
According to official data, a total of 10,082 youth of Balochistan joined the Pakistan Army as officers and soldiers in the last three years. The Army also undertook special projects to enrich the people of Balochistan with quality education and to boost the provincial economy.
The development projects and progressive works, launched by the Army in Balochistan include: Military College Sui, Balochistan Public School, Sui, Quetta Institute of Medical Sciences, Gwadar Institute of Technology, Chamalang Beneficiary Education Programme, Balochistan Institute of Technical Education, Army Institute of Mineralogy, Assistance to the Ministry of Education Balochistan, and Baloch Youth Enrolment in the Pakistan Army.
Besides Balochistan, the Army has also started various educational initiatives in KPK, especially for the people of Swat and the tribal areas. The most impressive among them is a youth rehabilitation programme launched for the militancy-affected youth of the Swat valley.
After the launch of the so-called US war on terrorism in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, the Taliban reorganised themselves and recruited hundreds of young boys and even children, aged seven or eight years old, to use them as suicide bombers against, not only the Pakistan Army, but also the general public. They brainwashed these children, telling them that the Pakistan Amy is an American army. And that if they would help kill the military men, they would go to heaven, along with all their family members.
According to a Sunday Times report, published recently, there are several jihadist reform programmes from Saudi Arabia to Sri Lanka but this one, for the Swat and tribal areas youth, is the only one to have had zero recidivism. Not one of the 145 teenage boys returned to society in the past three years has re-engaged in terrorism. "Of all the terrorism risk reduction programs I've visited this is one of the most impressive," said John Horgan, who runs the International Centre for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University.
Located in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province's Malakand Agency, the school is called Sabaoon, which means the first light of dawn in Pashto. The school was founded in September 2009, in Rangmahalla, near the Batkhela area of Malakand Agency, to educate children whom authorities arrested during the anti-militancy Operation Rah-e-Rast in Swat or those whose parents turned them over to security forces for their links with fugitive Swat Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah (Mullah Radio).
Doctors, teachers and psychologists are part of the team taking up the challenge of deradicalising some 200 young men. UNICEF also financed the project with a grant to the Hum Pakistani Foundation. The Lahore-based group of more than 20 non-governmental organisations was formed to assist the 3.5 million Pakistanis who were displaced during the army offensive that expelled the Taliban from Swat and surrounding areas in 2009.
Fehiba Peracha, 63, a clinical psychologist, is the project director, who practised in London for 20 years before moving back to Lahore.
About the boys at the centre she said: "It was clear these children are dangerous but brainwashed. The brainwashing was simple - the promise of heaven. A 15-year-old from a family of 15, was told his life is meaningless and promised heaven and 72 virgins, if he takes it up."
The psychologist blames their acceptance of this on Pakistan's faltering education system. She believes that these children could be brought back to normal life through guidance and special attention. She says that treatment is individually tailored to the needs of each young man. The approach includes mainstream academics with the aim of a high-school degree. Boys who never attended school before get vocational training to become electricians or repairmen. "I'm trying to give them the skills to chart their own course and goals to work for," said Peracha.
When they complete the deradicalisation programme, the young men are placed in jobs or in local schools where they continue to be closely monitored.
Peracha, with the help of young psychologists and social workers, had started with about 30 children aged eight to 18 and soon began to wonder what they had taken on. "At the beginning it was warfare," said Peracha. "They fought every day. I was horrified. I'd never seen such hatred."
They had been brainwashed to the extent that they objected to even wearing a Western-style uniform of green striped shirts and khaki slacks. But she persisted. Protected by the army and helped by funding from UNICEF, she set up a computer lab, library and television room and arranged sports activities, music and art lessons.
She says that most of them were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Some had been sexually abused by their commanders. Many had to be prescribed anti-depressants.
Fehiba Peracha conducts dozens of counselling sessions with these children. In one videotaped session recorded by the army, Peracha is the gentle inquisitor, questioning the boys about how they were pulled into the Taliban's orbit.
One young man says the Taliban "had their own weapons in the mosque."
"What were all these weapons doing in a mosque? Something to think about, isn't it," Peracha notes, firmly. "Yes," comes the reply.
She mostly opens her sessions assuring the young men they will not be punished for past transgressions. They had informed on the local population for the Taliban, extorted money from shop owners and performed all manner of menial tasks at the Taliban's orders.
In another session, she takes one of the boys to task for joining in the whipping of a young girl by a group of militants. He tells her he would have been "killed" had he not participated in the beating. But Peracha presses him: "Did you see any other member of the crowd beating her?"
"No, I didn't," is the answer.
"But you hit her 20 to 30 times. Did the poor girl die?"
"No, ma'am. I was hitting her gently, but he told me off and wanted me to use more force."
It is a painstaking process before the young men reveal the full extent of their involvement and indoctrination.
Peracha says the centre has treated more than 180 young men since opening in 2009.
At Sabaoon, these boys are taught Quranic studies also so they no longer take for granted what they are told by mullahs, in a programme designed by Muhammad Farooq, vice-chancellor of Swat University, who had been threatened by the Taliban for speaking out against militancy. He was assassinated in October 2010.
The school's success is attracting attention from counterterrorism experts. Richard Barrett, former head of UN monitoring of al-Qaeda and Taliban, visited in December and was impressed at how "Sabaoon can produce such well-motivated and positive graduates from a motley group of children recruited by the Taliban".
But he warned: "Its success depends entirely on army support and clearly the army cannot be expected to undertake this sort of program on the scale required in Pakistan as a whole," the Sunday Times report added.
As Peracha admits, it is a drop in the ocean. In the first week of May 2013, she was sent to evaluate 11 boys in Quetta aged 11-16 who had been caught planting roadside bombs for $15 a time. "There was no iconic leader, no rhetoric, just lack of any other opportunity and that's a massive problem," she said.
The military authorities running the centre believe that the youth afflicted with militancy plague could be made normal citizens with the help of Fehiba Peracha and her team. These young men could be put into schools and colleges again and imparted higher education, though the process is very slow and time-consuming.

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