Communication & radical thought

THE holding of a game-changing national seminar on de-radicalisation by the Pakistan Army in Swat this month is an important development.
It aims at shifting the existing strategy of confronting violence in Swat with military force to finding long-term solutions for eradicating the causes of extremism and radical thought.
Swat was regained after painful sacrifices. In this war, as one speaker commented during the seminar, Pakistan’s total number of military losses is one and a half army divisions as a result of deaths and injuries. In addition, there have been substantial civilian losses.
Casualties suffered by the Pakistan military are higher than the cumulative losses of all the 46 nations fighting in Afghanistan.
Even if Pakistan has not risen to the unrealistic expectations of others, its sacrifices for global peace cannot be trivialised.
One of the best antidotes against extremism and radicalisation is the effective use of strategic communication where the mindset of the population is positively influenced. Communication is made through speech, writing or the electronic medium.
The US Defence Science Board 2004 Summer Study on ‘Transition to and from Hostilities’, concluded that strategic communication in conflict-ridden countries is as important, if not more, than military operations. Thus any sum of money spent on strategic communication has more value than expenditure on other elements in a counter-radicalisation strategy.
Unfortunately, in Pakistan not much emphasis has been paid to this aspect of countering radicalisation.
One of the main reasons for Mullah Fazlullah’s success during the Swat conflict was the clever and effective use of FM broadcasting through an illicit transmitter. He not only won new adherents through threats but even earned the sympathies of Swat’s women through this medium. They were ultimately induced to contribute to his cause by providing him with voluntary donations and convincing their menfolk to join the ranks of the radicals.
The Swat militants executed civilians and police personnel and also beheaded more than 17 females. After these tragic events, the army was asked in May 2009 for its assistance in crushing the insurgency in Swat. This forced 750,000 persons to leave their homes and seek refuge in other places to avoid injury due to fighting. The terrorist rule had also destroyed Swat’s economy.
In a 2010 survey conducted across 384 randomly selected households in Swat, 78 per cent of the respondents believed that FM broadcasts by Fazlullah and his group were effective in enlarging support for the Taliban; 67 per cent of the households were of the view that face-to-face communications in the form of sermons preached in mosques created support for the Swat Taliban.In this connection it may be noted that those Afghans who had come to Pakistan in the 1980s as refugees, grew up in camps and remained there. Their children received religious education and most were able to find employment as imams in the local mosques. A prominent social change in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Fata since the 1990s has been the transfer of the control of mosques to Afghan refugees.
Since the parents of these imams were aligned to jihadi organisations of Afghanistan, many children inherited their extreme views. Today, many of Swat’s mosques are managed by prayer leaders of Afghan descent. Many became associated with the Pakistani alumni of other madressahs run by religious parties.
These links played a prominent role in providing protection to the extremists in Swat, when the MMA religious alliance government ruled the then NWFP after the 2002 elections. In the same survey, 75 per cent of the households thought that the MMA government supported the Swat militants. It could not be otherwise.
However, one of the most pernicious effects of electronic communications was its impact on the women of Swat. As soon as the Taliban took control they forbade women to be seen in open spaces; thus women were confined to their homes.
Then the Taliban banned other competing media like the TV and the usual radio channels terming them un-Islamic. Television was outlawed for showing images and the radio for broadcasting music.
Thus women became prisoners in their homes, where they had no sources of information and no pastime other than listening to Mullah Radio. A bizarre situation ensued. Many women participating in their survey said that listening to the radio and calling Fazlullah on the phone imparted a sense of ‘empowerment’. They could phone the leader of the Swat Taliban and lodge complaints against their menfolk many of whom received warnings and had to give rights to their womenfolk; something that the state has failed to do.
Thus many women in Swat became captives of the Taliban and supplied them with finances and manpower. Even with the military operation removing the terrorist Taliban network from Swat some women still yearn for the good old days when Mullah Radio could be heard and they could feel empowered.
There are many lessons here that are useful for transforming the mindset of the people through modern means of communication. This could be a winner in the effort to confront extremism and counter radicalism; it is an instrument that must be used effectively in the new national strategy against de-radicalisation.
Obviously, if the tide is to be turned then Pakistan must invest heavily in communication in its different forms. It is a truism amongst experts that the value of mind transformation is a higher virtue than economic development in the war against extremism.
The writer is chairman of the Regional Institute of Policy Research in Peshawar.
azizkhalid@gmail.com
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