Pakistan: The Most Dangerous Place To 'Go-To-School'

More attacks on schools have occurred there than in the next four most dangerous countries combined.

Education is a dangerous thing in Pakistan. Tuesday’s horrific attack, in which more than 120 students were killed at an army school in Peshawar, was the latest in a long list of assaults over the last few years that runs into the thousands. Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s case might be the most well known, but a quick look at the country’s past makes it clear that little has changed since those infamous shots rang out in 2012, turning her into a household name the world over.


Six attackers entered a school for the children of army personnel in Peshawar on Tuesday around 11 am, when hundreds of students were in attendance.
According to the local authorities, the attackers started firing indiscriminately and, once security guards started to approach them, some blew themselves up using suicide vests.

As of Tuesday evening, the authorities had put the toll at 126, most of them students. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, took credit for the attack, saying that it was revenge for the government’s military offensive against militant groups in the troubled northwest of the country.

“We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” said a Taliban spokesman, Muhammad Umar Khorasani. “We want them to feel the pain.”

This pain is not new to parents of school-going children in Pakistan though. A report by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, at the University of Maryland, concluded that there had been more attacks on educational institutions in Pakistan in 2012 than in the next four countries combined. Included in those other four countries is Afghanistan, a state generally believed to be much more hostile to education.

“In areas affected by Taliban militancy, hundreds of schools were blown up and proponents of female education were killed,” says a report by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack.”The total number of reported militant attacks on schools in 2009-2012 was at least 838 and could be as high as 919. Difficulties faced by journalists and other observers working in the worst affected areas mean that the true total could be considerably higher.” The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reported 505 schools damaged or destroyed in 2009 alone.

Unlike in the Peshawar Army School case, where the Taliban has said they are responding to the Pakistani military’s Operation Zarb-e-Azb, most of these attacks are often linked to the antipathy against female education.

For example, in January 2009, Taliban militants, who were in control of the Swat Valley in the Pakistan’s northwest, banned girls’ schooling altogether, forcing 900 schools to shut shop or stop enrolling girls. “Some 120,000 girls and 8,000 female teachers stopped attending school in Swat district,” the GCPEA report said. “Over the following months, the Pakistani military regained control of the area but many schoolgirls and female teachers were too scared to return to school nearly a year after the military ousted the Taliban.”

Most problematically, the perpetrators of these attacks are rarely brought to justice, encouraging an atmosphere of impunity. The result is a country that does terribly on most education metrics, particularly when it comes to female students.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation said in 2013 that Pakistan has the second-largest number of children out of schools in the world, after Nigeria. The UN also found that nearly half of primary school age children are not enrolled in school in Pakistan and, when looking at only girls, that number goes up to a whopping 75%. After Tuesday's attack, at a prominent army school in a big city, it is hard to see things getting much better any time soon.