MILITANTS operating in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa seem intent on depriving women of any hopes of a bright future as reports emerge of the destruction of three more girls' schools over the weekend from Nowshera, Swabi and Bannu districts. Combine the latest attacks with the assaults that have taken place in the settled areas of the province since July, and one arrives at the figure of 12 schools destroyed in the same districts, including three in Mardan and one in Charsadda. Bara, a Peshawar suburb in the Khyber Agency, has also taken similar hits on girls' schools, while the overall number of those targeted by the Taliban and their ilk in Fata and the erstwhile Taliban-infested Malakand division, including Swat, since 2007, is simply staggering. It is true that new schools and colleges are being built and some of the existing ones are being up- graded in the affected areas of the province, but the fact remains that few attacks on the existing schools have been preven- ted. Hundreds of children, mostly girls, have lost their schools, with parents understandably worried about their children's safety in sending them for makeshift classes in areas where such stop-gap arrangements have been made. Women teachers in many settled areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including Peshawar and Kohat, have also been subjected to harassment and threats by extremists, who have attacked or threatened them for stepping out of their houses to go to work in recent months.

The situation calls for increased vigilance by putting in place innovative and affordable mechanisms such as community-based policing, as the province's law-enforcement agencies are woefully inadequate: they are understaffed, under-trained, underpaid and thus little motivated to rise to the challenge to contain the threat at hand. While President Asif Zardari's initiative, launched two years ago, of building 1,000 new schools in the affected areas of the province with federal assistance has seen little work done on the ground, especially now after the devolution of power and resources to the provinces, the promise of building new schools, even where they are being built, will be neutralised by the failure to secure the existing ones.