WUNRN
PAKISTAN - WOMEN ARE HELPING
IDENTIFY & COUNTER EXTREMISM
Women
in
By Danielle Shapiro
April 14, 2014 - As Mossarat Qadeem
tells the story, the big clue came from a simple source: a young woman who
noticed her brother spending time with strangers.
It was about one year ago in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province,
formerly called the North-West Frontier province, when the 25-year-old woman
noticed a group of men she did not recognize meeting in the evenings in a house
on her street. Several young men from her area were attending these meetings,
including her 18-year-old brother. Yet her brother wouldn’t tell her what it
was all about. His secrecy sparked her suspicion, said Qadeem, founder and
executive director of PAIMAN Alumni Trust, an Islamabad-based non-profit that,
among other initiatives, works with mothers in some of the country’s most
conflict-ridden areas to de-radicalize their sons. Thus far, she said, her
organization has turned 455 individuals away from militancy.
The young woman, a member of a local peace group
created by PAIMAN called TOLANA, which means “together” in Pashto, asked her
male colleagues to investigate. They went to the meetings themselves and
learned that the strangers were trying to lure local boys out of the city and
into their radical group. TOLANA members then informed the sister and her
parents who took the boy to stay with an aunt who lived elsewhere. Their
response prevented him from joining the violent ranks of militants wreaking
havoc across Pakistan. All because his sister saw some strangers.
“So it was like an early warning for the community
that something strange is taking place here,” said Qadeem, who calls her
organization’s model of countering extremism an indigenous one, rooted in the
local culture and religious traditions. “They all gathered because of the
warning of just one woman.”
Qadeem told her story recently while in Washington,
D.C. as part of a four-woman delegation from Pakistan here to seek support from
U.S. policymakers for their efforts to increase the role of women in
initiatives to counter violent extremism. Joining Qadeem were Huma Chughtai, a
gender and police reform specialist, Shaista Pervaiz, who represents Punjab
province as a member of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz in the National
Assembly and is the general secretary of the Women’s Parliamentary Caucus, and
Nuzhat Sadiq, a senator in the Pakistani parliament who also represents Punjab
province as a member of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz.
‘It makes perfect sense to have more females involved in counter-insurgency, especially when we know that a lot of them are already involved in the insurgency side.’
The delegates explained that women are critical in
fighting extremism precisely because of Pakistan’s conservative social norms and
religious customs. These traditions mean that the genders are often segregated
and thus women have access to other women in ways that men do not, like being
able to enter private homes where females are present. Women are also often the
first to see behavioral changes that can be signs of growing militancy in their
family members, male and female alike, and women can be particularly effective
in building trust between communities and law enforcement.
Strategically, this focus on women makes perfect
sense, said Hedieh Mirahmadi, president of The World Organization for Resource
Development and Education and a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute for
Near East Policy. Mirahmadi testified before the House Foreign Affairs
Committee recently on the topic of women’s role in preventing radicalism.
“They are the first line of defense,” she said,
noting that women can help disengage relatives from violence or, through their
influence within the family, thwart their descent into violence in the first
place. “Countering violent extremism, we believe, it’s a prevention framework.
So it’s not just the capture-or-kill focus of counter-terrorism. It’s supposed
to be a prevention model. So they are part of that early prevention process.”
In conversations with policymakers including
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader in the House,
other members of Congress, and officials from the State Department, the
Pentagon, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the National
Security Council, the delegates stressed that they were not asking for money.
Rather, they said they wanted to see some of the millions in aid Congress has
appropriated for Pakistan allocated specifically to improving women’s roles in
the struggle against radicalism. Since 2002, the appropriations have totaled
more than $800 million for law enforcement and counter-narcotics alone,
according to the Congressional Research Service.
The delegates focused on expanding U.S. support for
grass-roots, female-led initiatives against violent extremism, strengthening
women’s inclusion in creating Pakistan’s strategic priorities related to
internal security, counter-terrorism and negotiations to end violent extremism,
and especially the need to increase the recruitment, retention and professionalization
of women in the Pakistani police force. To date, congressional appropriations
to Pakistan have not prioritized engaging more women in the police, according
to a report by the Institute for Inclusive Security, a D.C-based organization
that works to increase the participation of women in peace processes and that
hosted the women during their week-long visit.
“This is a missing link in our set-up,” said
Chughtai, as she prepped with her colleagues before their meeting with
Representative Pelosi. “We have women in the police force, but the number is
very small, the number is less than 1 percent.”
This oversight is not one Pakistan can afford.
Terrorism and insurgency-related violence may have claimed as many as 49,000
lives since 2001, according to Pakistani intelligence reports cited by the
Congressional Research Service.
“Extremism and internal security—it all boils down
to the fact that police is the first responder,” said Chughtai during a panel
discussion with the other delegates at the Atlantic Council last week. Using
her background in Sharia and international human rights law, Chughtai has
advised individuals and organizations on national and international human
rights and women's rights conventions, linking those with Islamic tenets. She
thus counters arguments that fuel extremism and promotes peace and interfaith
harmony.
Yet without women police officers, female victims of
bomb blasts have been left to die because male responders cannot attend to
them, thus reducing trust between the community and police. Raids into homes
where females are present or searches of women are not possible, and in
general, gathering valuable intelligence from women or community members is
constrained.
According to Inclusive Security, citing statistics
released by the National Police Bureau of Pakistan in 2011, just over 4,000 of
the 453,901 members of the police force were women. Only 85 of them served in
higher ranks.
Still, Moeed Yusuf, director of the South Asia
programs at the United States Institute of Peace, said it’s not the number of
women in the police force that matters most. It’s putting them in roles where
they can be most effective. This, he said, is in building police and community
relations.
“The fundamental thing that you have to do is better
law enforcement,” he said, “which, in turn, requires you to have the trust of
the society, which means better police-community relations.”
Yusuf explained that women officers excel in these
positions by using their networks among mothers, who he said would not go to
male police officers, to build trust and identify young people vulnerable to
the lure of violent, intolerant ideologies. Such early identification is key,
of course, to preventing the spread of extremism.
“There is no other more effective way to actually
handle this than that,” he said. “And that’s lacking.”
It is also well known that militant groups already
include female members and that other women, especially those left bitter from
the loss of a loved one, are vulnerable to recruitment, said Haider Mullick, an
adjunct professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
“So I think it makes perfect sense to have more
females involved in counter-insurgency,” he said, “especially when we know that
a lot of them are already involved in the insurgency side.”
Allison Peters, a policy advisor at Inclusive
Security who also leads the organization’s advocacy work on Pakistan and
recently spent a week with the women delegates, said there were several reasons
why their visit was especially timely. Of particular concern is the drawdown of
NATO troops from Afghanistan later this year and what any subsequent security
vacuum along the borders will mean for Pakistan. She further highlighted the
Pakistani government’s ongoing attempts to negotiate with the Pakistani
Taliban, the resumption of the ministerial-level U.S.-Pakistan Strategic
Dialogue after a three-year break, the development of Pakistan’s first
comprehensive internal security policy, ongoing terrorist attacks, and a new
multinational fund announced by the U.S. and Turkey that will provide financial
support to locally-led initiatives to combat violent extremism in Pakistan and
elsewhere. The delegates stressed that women need to be part of many of these
conversations and need to help shape the policies that result.
While it is perhaps too early to know how the
women’s recent week of advocacy will turn into action on the ground, Swanee
Hunt, founder and chairperson of Inclusive Security, emphasized the importance
of their presence, of their voices being heard, and of the chance it brings for
change. Pervaiz, the National Assembly member, agreed that having an
opportunity as the “stakeholders” to meet in person with decision makers leaves
a unique impact.
“It has given a very humane touch to the whole
thing,” she said. “When people come into contact, when you share experiences,
when you share your thoughts, that makes a lot of difference.”
Hunt, who served as the United States ambassador to
Austria from 1993 to 1997, also said that the ways women are fighting back
against violent extremism in Pakistan, as part of the police force and without,
can be a global model.
“It’s law enforcement but it’s beyond that, it’s
what women bring into law enforcement,” she said. “They are disarming
extremists with no collateral damage. Unlike a drone attack, which is
extremely, extremely expensive, and kills many more innocent than it does the
extremists that it’s targeting.
“The basic question is why should we meet murder
with murder?” Hunt continued. “When we do that we lose the war and we lose
ourselves also, we lose the humanity in ourselves. And that’s what these women
understand. So when they go out, someone like Mossarat Qadeem, when she goes
out, she is winning back the young men and their mothers. She’s not going out
to kill them. So what they’re talking about is transformation. It’s really the
most noble form of foreign policy.”