by Anita Weiss, Professor and Head, Department of International Studies

The majestic Valley of Swat has endured many challenges and transformations in its storied history, but none may have the lasting impact on space and society as the occupation of the area by the Pakistan Taliban in the mid-2000s and the subsequent invasion by the Pakistan military to root them out in May 2009. The winding road to Swat, up through the Malakand Pass in the Provincially Administered Tribal Area (PATA) of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, makes for a formidable barrier from the rest of Pakistan. I traveled to various areas within Swat twice in 2010 to meet with women and hear their stories of what they endured during that period. Whether meeting with returned refugees or a group of widows in Saidu Sharif, or women who remained during that time despite horrific living conditions in Manglawar, or displaced teachers and healthcare workers in Matta in Upper Swat, the message that emerged was similar: confusion over the causes of the crisis combined with an eagerness to share their ideas on how to move past it. A woman captured this sentiment when she said to me, “We’re still afraid: afraid of the unknown, and we don’t know how it all happened.”

I conducted this research to try to give these women a voice, to facilitate their brainstorming of what was possible in their futures. The majority of women with whom I met were uneducated, largely illiterate, and all were enthusiastic to share their stories with me. They responded with a clear need for income opportunities, investment in schools, the state to maintain security in Swat, and especially to enable them to facilitate their own empowerment. Swatis need jobs, and wages paid for doing those jobs. Many women know how to sew; they want women’s centers set up where they can access sewing machines and cooperative marketing of their products. While smaller NGOs have tried such programs, it’s the larger ODA donors who have the resources to support such projects on a large scale but are largely unresponsive to these women’s words. Rather than recognizing women’s empowerment as foundational to rising above the strife that has plagued Swat, their focus has been on other things (madrassah education, military support and engagement, political institutions), many of which are less tangible and often irrelevant to women’s immediate needs.

Swat had remained a semi-autonomous princely state until 1969 when it finally acceded to Pakistan. Its ruler, the Wali of Swat, had governed the area through a combination of Islamic law (shariah) and paternalistic decrees. For roughly twenty years, Swat underwent a period of adjustment. The two most significant changes included the arrival of numerous government bureaucrats—people not indigenous to the area, didn’t know the local people and practices, took seemingly forever to effect change, and could be bribed, in contrast to the Wali’s retinue—and the British-based system of law, a legacy of the Raj used throughout Pakistan today. Gradually, Swatis began to miss the “speedy justice” of the days of the Wali’s rule, albeit it had been autocratic and paternalistic. The longer that disputes remained unresolved, the more they festered and prompted violent clashes between groups.

Sufi Mohammad and his supporters founded the Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) in 1989 with the goal to reinstate shariah as the primary legal system in Malakand and Kohistan in PATA. The movement quickly gained support in Swat; legal delays remained incessant and outcomes became widely perceived as influenced more by bribery and intrigues than by justice. Imprisoned upon returning to Pakistan from fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan in January 2002, Sufi Mohammad’s son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, took up the leadership of the Swat faction of the TNSM in 2003. Notably, this was shortly after a coalition of Islamist political parties, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) had won the provincial election in the NWFP in October 2002. The social reform agenda of this Islamist coalition was built largely on limiting women’s movement and choices.¹ Indeed, the presence of the MMA government from 2002-07 played an important role in opening a space for groups such as the TNSM and related “Taliban” factions to gain a foothold and build upon their influence in the province.

"We’re still afraid: afraid of the unknown, and we don’t know how it all happened.”

Fazlullah began broadcasting programs on Islam and instructions on how to live “as a good Muslim” via FM radio in 2004. Women, in great numbers, tuned into Fazlullah’s programs. For many, this was a legitimate form of entertainment and connected them to a kind of global modernity where people use mobile phones and listen to the radio. Women became Fazlullah’s most enthusiastic supporters. 

Within a few years, the TNSM was targeting police stations and other official offices in their quest to get shariah declared the legal system in Malakand district. People were confused about the seemingly mixed messages emanating from the FM station, and were reluctant to act against Fazlullah. In December 2007, he and his followers helped found the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, often referred to as “the Taliban” by Swatis), headed overall by Baitullah Mahsud but headed locally—in Swat—by Fazlullah. 

As the influence of Fazlullah and his TTP grew in Swat, three things occurred: the bazaar—all public trading areas—was closed; women had to be in full purdah and wear the “shuttlecock” burqa; and girls were discouraged from going to school. In early 2009 Fazlullah’s TTP turned to destroying girls’ schools on the warped assumption that neither tradition nor Islam support girls’ education. A climate of fear was created. Swat’s economy was particularly hard hit as tourists were now avoiding Swat, given the unrelenting violence perpetrated by the TTP. Threatening goods transporters and shopkeepers alike, the TTP destroyed commerce in Swat. As the economy condensed only the TTP could offer employment, hiring young men to serve as recruits, paying a bit more if a man agreed to be a gunman, and paying quite a bit more to families when a son was successful as a suicide bomber. They actively restricted women from work and travel, stopping rickshaws and other modes of transport, demanding women within to wear the burqa and go home. Between the beheadings, school bombings, and the closing of most bazaars, somehow the impetus to fight back eluded the Swatis.

What women endured during the time the Pakistan Taliban controlled Swat and when the Pakistan army announced in May 2009 to leave the area or risk being killed as Taliban, is inconceivable in the West. Husbands were killed who were in the police, the army, and the Taliban, and even those who were innocent bystanders: one woman told me her husband was killed by a flying shell when he went out of their house to fetch water. Given the tradition of marrying off girls just after puberty, tragic numbers of young women below the age of twenty are widows with multiple children and no source of income.

Rebuilding from the devastation continues in Swat. Regardless of class, women had lived sheltered lives cared for by fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, many of whom are no longer there. The military’s ongoing presence in Swat is important to women as the role of protector is now being shouldered by the military.

It will take generations for Swatis to get past how their country has been transformed and militantized during the past decade. Movements like the TTP exist on fear and repressing the disempowered. Women in Swat are now organizing to envision a future, one consisting of completing their education, getting married and remaining married, being able to bring in a reasonable income, and not living in constant fear as women still do today.   

1. My earlier research on the MMA, its social reform agenda and effects on women’s rights, is available in “A Provincial Islamist Victory in NWFP, Pakistan: The Social Reform Agenda of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal” in John L. Esposito and John Voll (eds.) Asian Islam in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 145-173) and in “Straddling CEDAW and the MMA: Conflicting Visions of Women's Rights in Contemporary Pakistan” in Kenneth M. Cuno and Manisha Desai (eds.) Family, Gender & Law in a Globalizing Middle East & South Asia (Syracuse University Press, 2009, pp. 163-183).

Anita M. Weiss is a long-time CSWS associate. She has published extensively on social development, gender issues, and political Islam in Pakistan. Her current research project is analyzing how distinct constituencies in Pakistan, including the state, are grappling with articulating their views on women's rights. Professor Weiss is a member of the editorial boards of Citizenship Studies and Globalizations, is on the editorial advisory board of Kumarian Press, and is the incoming vice president of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies.