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FAREED KHAN/AP PHOTO global I REPORTS Taking on Pakistan’s Taliban Women are crucial in the struggle against violent extremism A 22 | FALL 2009 S IT BATTLES TALIBANIZATION, PAKISTAN IS ON A COLLISION COURSE WITH its progressive past. Will the nation of the first Muslim woman presidential candi- date (Fatima Jinnah, 1965) and first woman head of government in the Muslim world (Benazir Bhutto, 1988) be subverted by mullahs and militias? A nuclear-armed country of 170 million people, Pakistan is an easy target for radical movements because of its low social indicators. It ranks 139 out of 179 on the U.N.’s Human Development Index, and 127 out of 130 countries on the World Economic Forum’s 2008 Gender Gap Report. Six decades of militarization have left little funding for education (although a recent budget vote increased the per- cent of the gross domestic product spent on education from 2 percent to 7 percent) or health care (0.8 percent of the GDP). With no effective public education system, responsibility for educating the two-thirds of the population under age 25 (almost 100 million) has been abdicated to the private sector. The Taliban, who promulgate an extreme Islamist Wahhabi ideology, mobilize and grow through franchising mosques and madrasas. Young boys in madrasas are www.feminist.org