Pakistan: inside the 'Taliban generation'

If you’re the sort of person who lies awake at night worrying that the Taliban might get their hands on nuclear weapons, probably best you avoid watching Dispatches on this channel tonight.

News correspondents all too often end up reporting the incremental ratcheting up of a problem. It’s startling to be confronted with the big picture reality of what’s happening in Pakistan.

A boy who’s lived through a US missile strike on his village says he wants to join the Talibs. His best friend wants to join the army so he can “kill all the terrorists in Pakistan.” They each say they’d kill the other if it came to it. “This is a war that’s making Pakistanis choose,” says the Karachi-born reporter, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.

She asks a wounded soldier in a military hospital why the Taliban hate the army so much. “Because of the American policies we adopted,” the man, who’s just lost his eye in a roadside bomb, tells her. The military minders ask “Madam Shareen” to scrub that answer from the record.

I’m reminded of the adage, “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”. Can the Pakistan government really not see the impact of its policies? Are they so wrapped up in their political battles that they’ve become blind to the mortal danger the country’s now in?

There are plenty of eye-openers in this film, which takes you into the Swat Valley (now in the hands of the Islamists, following the government’s recent capitulation with local Talibs there).

You meet girls whose schools have been destroyed and who don’t like wearing burkas because they trip over them. The film captures the telling details that in news, we often don’t have time to squeeze in.

And it’s in befriending and spending time with a young cricket-playing student at an Islamist madrassa in her home city of Karachi that Obaid-Chinoy elicits a chilling vision of what it may, in the not-too-distant future, be like to live there.

She listens incredulously as (the appropriately named) Shahid, the would-be martyr, tells her: “Women and girls should be banned from wandering around outside, just like [the government] banned plastic bags. No one uses them now. We should do the same with women.”

“Kids are the tools to achieve God’s will,” Shahid’s teacher says.

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