Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
The first documented attack came on December 25, 2006, when a bomb damaged a girls’ school in Noor Ali Kalay, in Darra Adamkhel, Kohat District. Three rooms were destroyed. Before the blast, extremists had circulated threatening letters to middle and high schools, warning them to stop girls from studying beyond Class IV or face the destruction of school buildings and the killing of principals. It was not an isolated act of vandalism. It was the beginning of a campaign. A declaration of war not only against buildings, but against literacy, girls, modernity, the state, and the possibility that children born in the periphery might grow into citizens rather than subjects.
From early 2007, the campaign became systematic, especially in Swat and adjoining tribal regions. The Swat Taliban, led by Maulana Fazlullah, the infamous “Mullah Radio”, turned education into a battlefield. Girls’ schools were attacked because girls’ education was seen as rebellion. Schools were attacked because they represented the state. Teachers were threatened because they represented another source of authority. Classrooms were bombed because the Taliban understood what many governments pretend not to understand: education is power. To destroy a school is to destroy the future before it learns to speak.
The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan often justified its attacks as retaliation for military operations in the tribal areas. In February 2009, TTP Bajaur spokesperson Maulvi Omar warned that militants would “take action and destroy all the buildings of educational institutions” if security forces continued operations against them. But this was only the propaganda layer. The deeper objective was ideological. The Taliban were not simply responding to military pressure. They were attempting to remake society. They wanted to control what children learned, whether girls could study, who had the right to think, and who had the right to command. The school was not collateral damage. It was the target.
The world understood this most clearly on October 9, 2012, when the Swat chapter of the TTP shot 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai as she returned home from school in Mingora. Her crime was not politics in any conventional sense. Her crime was going to school and saying publicly that other girls had the same right. She had already become known for documenting, through the BBC, life under Taliban restrictions and the attack on girls’ education in Swat. The TTP understood the danger she represented. A girl with a book was more threatening than a battalion because she exposed the moral obscenity of their project. Malala survived, became an international symbol of children’s rights, and later the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Pakistan celebrated her when the world celebrated her. But the system that made her shooting possible was not dismantled. It was merely pushed into another geography, another slogan, another operation.
Then came December 16, 2014. The Army Public School massacre in Peshawar remains the deadliest attack on an educational institution in Pakistan’s history. A seven-member TTP suicide squad stormed the school and killed at least 135 students, 10 staff members, including the principal, and three soldiers. Another 121 people were injured. The attack began around 10 a.m. and lasted more than eight hours before security forces killed the attackers. It was an atrocity so naked that even Pakistan’s establishment could not absorb it into its usual vocabulary of ambiguity. Children of military families had been slaughtered inside a school run by the army itself. The monster had entered the house of its former managers.
After APS, Pakistan announced that everything would change. The moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in terrorism-related cases. The National Internal Security Policy was pushed forward. In January 2015, the 20-point National Action Plan was approved with the promise to “root out terrorism”. Thousands of suspected terrorists were listed. Executions resumed. Operations intensified in the tribal belt, building on Operation Zarb-e-Azb, launched in North Waziristan in June 2014. Later, in February 2017, Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad was launched nationwide to eliminate residual and emerging militant threats. The vocabulary was muscular, almost theatrical: sharp and cutting, elimination of discord, national action, eradication, cleansing.
But Pakistan has always been better at naming operations than changing structures.
Even after APS, educational institutions remained targets. On January 20, 2016, terrorists attacked Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, killing at least 21 people and injuring 35. Among the dead were 17 students, a professor, two gardeners and a caretaker. The attack was claimed by Khalifa Umar Mansoor, a TTP Geedar faction commander also linked to the APS massacre. On December 1, 2017, TTP militants attacked the Agricultural Training Institute in Peshawar, killing at least nine people, including six students, and injuring 37 students. Between APS and ATI alone, excluding those two major attacks, at least 30 attacks on educational institutions were recorded, causing 33 deaths and 40 injuries.
The numbers declined later, especially during the extended enforcement period of Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad, which continued officially until July 22, 2024. Attacks fell to single digits, then to only a handful annually between 2020 and 2022, and reportedly to zero in 2023. Islamabad would like to present this as success. It was, at best, containment. The networks had been weakened, not defeated. The ideology had been pressured, not uprooted. The infrastructure of extremism had been disrupted, not dismantled. Most importantly, the strategic culture that fed this disaster had never been seriously questioned.
Because the central scandal is not only that the Taliban attacked schools. The scandal is that Pakistan spent decades cultivating, tolerating, negotiating with, redirecting, fragmenting and recycling jihadist forces, while insisting each time that the latest monster was separate from the previous one. Militancy was useful when it operated across borders. It became terrorism when it turned inward. The same ideological swamp that was once treated as strategic depth became a national-security emergency when it swallowed Pakistani children. This is the original sin Pakistan refuses to name.
The return of the Afghan Taliban to power in 2021 emboldened the TTP and allied groups, many of whose cadres had taken refuge in Afghanistan’s border regions. Across the border, the Afghan Taliban institutionalised restrictions on girls’ education with the cruelty of men terrified by classrooms. In Pakistan’s tribal areas, the TTP could not impose the same model openly and comprehensively, but it continued to attack educational institutions, disrupt schooling and frighten families. In July 2024, a leaked telephone conversation allegedly involving TTP chief Noor Wali suggested plans to target schools, hospitals and security forces with explosives, while avoiding public claims of responsibility. In other words: terror without signature, violence without accountability, intimidation without formal ownership. The perfect method for an insurgency that understands both fear and optics.
After almost disappearing in 2023, attacks on educational institutions resurfaced in 2024, with 10 incidents recorded. In 2025, the number rose slightly to 11. In the first five months and 13 days of 2026 alone, another 11 attacks had already been recorded. This is not an anomaly. It is a warning. The war against education in KP is not over. It has merely changed tempo.
And while bombs destroy schools, the deeper destruction is already visible in the numbers of children who never reach them. According to an October 2025 report by the Benazir Income Support Programme, approximately 4.7 million children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are out of school. The crisis is most acute in the merged tribal districts, the former FATA, where poverty, insecurity, cultural barriers and collapsing infrastructure converge. The gender gap is devastating: 74.4 per cent of girls and 38.5 per cent of boys in these areas remain outside the formal education system. Kohistan, North Waziristan and Bajaur are among the worst affected. These are not merely underdeveloped districts. They are the zones where Pakistan’s security obsessions, administrative neglect and militant violence have produced a generational emergency.
The provincial government has announced another development package. In January 2026, a high-level meeting chaired by Chief Minister Muhammad Sohail Afridi finalised an education-focused plan for the merged districts: 1,245 new primary schools, the upgrading of existing institutions, rehabilitation of 1,340 damaged schools, recruitment of 11,500 teachers and scholarship programmes. On paper, it is necessary. On paper, it is ambitious. On paper, Pakistan is always building the future. The problem is that children cannot study on paper. Teachers cannot work inside promises. Girls cannot attend schools guarded only by press releases.
The merged districts do not need another performance of state concern. They need security that is not militarisation, development that is not propaganda, education that is not hostage to ideology, and governance that does not arrive only after a massacre. They need a state that protects children with the same urgency with which it protects generals, cantonments, mineral corridors and political egos. They need schools that are not treated as soft targets, girls who are not treated as cultural threats, and teachers who are not asked to become martyrs for salaries that barely keep them alive.
Pakistan’s treatment of education in KP exposes the deeper architecture of the state. It is harsh against dissent, but ambiguous toward extremism. It disappears activists, jails Baloch students, criminalises Pashtun rights movements, censors journalists and invokes anti-terror laws against those who ask uncomfortable questions. Yet when faced with the ideological ecosystems that have actually massacred children, bombed schools and destroyed communities, it oscillates between operation, negotiation, denial and selective enforcement. The state is often most efficient against the peaceful and most confused against the armed.
That is why the crisis of education in KP cannot be separated from Pakistan’s broader crisis of citizenship. A child in North Waziristan, Bajaur or Kohistan is born into a hierarchy of concern. Islamabad discovers him when militants recruit him, when drones kill near him, when soldiers operate around him, or when a school attack becomes too large to ignore. A girl becomes visible only when she is forbidden to study, shot for studying, or counted among the millions out of school. Until then, she belongs to the invisible Pakistan: the periphery that supplies grief but not power.
The Taliban know exactly what they are doing when they attack schools. The question is whether Pakistan knows what it has done by allowing this war on education to continue for two decades. Since 2006, hundreds of attacks have shown that classrooms are not incidental victims of militancy. They are one of its central fronts. The fight over education is the fight over the kind of society Pakistan will become: one governed by citizens or one managed by clerics, commanders and intelligence calculations.
Every destroyed school in KP is therefore more than a ruin. It is an accusation. Against the militants who bombed it. Against the state that failed to protect it. Against the generals who believed extremism could be domesticated. Against the politicians who announce packages after every disaster. Against the international partners who fund “stability” while avoiding the uncomfortable history of Pakistan’s security doctrine.
A country that cannot keep its schools open cannot pretend to have defeated terrorism. A state that cannot protect girls on their way to class cannot call itself sovereign in any meaningful sense. And a republic that treats dissent as a greater danger than fanaticism has already chosen the side from which its next crisis will come.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the war on education continues. It continues in the bombed classroom, in the empty girls’ school, in the teacher afraid to go to work, in the parent who keeps a daughter home, in the child counted among 4.7 million out of school. Pakistan calls this a security challenge. It is more than that. It is a national indictment.
