Bad times for Swat

THE militants in Swat have an eclectic mix of targets. In addition to girls school, barbershops and CD shops, their diversified portfolio of targets now includes snooker clubs, some of which have been torched in the valley recently. Their puritanical brand of Islam probably does not take too kindly to this western sport. Specially one that is performed in seedy little smoke-filled halls. And this in a place that was once very welcoming to alien cultures and outsiders. As common wisdom in the Frontier says, Dir, despite being as beautiful as Swat, could not make it as a tourist hotspot the way Swat did because its people were not as welcoming as the latter were. A far cry from the violence of today when the valley is in the news for all the wrong reasons.
The people of Swat, many of whom had to depend on the tourism industry to survive, have been badly hit economically because of this crisis. The time this particular crisis is taking to resolve is a comment on the general effectiveness of the machinery of the state, whether it is the army, the law enforcement agencies or the civil administration. Perhaps if the local political structures were to be employed a bit more productively, we could see results.
There needs to be an atmosphere of dialogue rather than the sloppy application of brute force. True, the militants, in many cases, have certainly been terrorising the local population. But instead of using this as a tool to rally the local population against them, the trigger-happy government has launched a clutzy operation in which it is difficult to control collateral damage, that horrible precept. There is much TV footage of troops on patrol firing randomly into the woods, not knowing who is hitting what, making the problem even worse. This failure of the army, its intelligence, the police and now, the political government needs to be compensated for as soon as possible.