“After being humiliated and looted by the courts, revenue officials and the police, one wishes to welcome the Taliban back,” said Aftab Ahmad wearily. Ahmad, a social development worker living in Bahrain Swat, had a forest revenue case pending with the district officer of Revenue and Estate. He further said that the aforementioned officer, an apparently pious man with a white long beard, wearing “Islamic” clothing, demanded a 20 per cent share in the forest royalty that Aftab would get from the revenue from the forests.

“The situation in the education department, especially with the management, is no different. I am a teacher and know first hand of the corruption these education officials do. We are supposed to be the ‘builders’ of this nation but in reality the opposite is happening,” Noor Khan, a teacher and resident of Swat said wryly.

Once on my way back from Islamabad just before the Baqr Eid of 2009, I was stuck in Mingora due to a curfew. I stayed with an acquaintance who was a principal posted at a high school in the nearby district Shangla. He told me about his experience; of the ill treatment by the junior clerks in the district education office.

He had applied for a transfer from Shangla to Swat back in 2006. He has since then regularly been following up on his application, but to no avail. The clerk bullies him; his application lies pending since. He added that during the Taliban’s high days in Swat, he had visited the district office one day and was pleasantly surprised at the politer treatment he got by the junior officials. Stunned, he inquired from a junior officer and was told that the previous day a Talib had visited the office with his gun.

This is not to glorify the Taliban in Swat but to lament the sorry affairs of governance before and after the Taliban. It is often asked by many Pakistanis why some of the local people joined the Taliban in Swat; and why things went from bad to worse like an explosion. This question has many dimensions.

The dirty strategy aside, the ignorant, simple people – mostly youth from the poor and socially weak families in Swat – joined the Taliban as a reaction against the corrupt police, courts and governance. The Police was the worst victim of the insurgency. Every morning slaughtered bodies of policemen were seen strung on trees, on road sides and in the fields.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the rise of Taliban in Swat was solely due to the above factors, neither can it be categorised as a class war based on social injustices. But our observation is that the social injustices, bad governance and corruption in the courts, police and other departments provided spaces for the Taliban to fill and accelerate their movement by attracting the ignorant, young angry men.

After a so-far-successful military operation it was duly expected that the said departments would behave upright as they had seen the worst under the Taliban. The government was expected to be more diligent and meticulous through its representatives and officials. It is said that the provincial government decided to spend the rehabilitation funds provided by the international community through the provincial assembly members in Swat but what we see is a total failure. Neither was the governance issue reformed, nor the representatives — who had been the most wanted targets by militants; of which few have also been killed — became vigilant and more responsible, with some exceptions.

The Swati people deserve special treatment because they have undergone extremely trying times either being in Swat or leaving it for the displaced persons’ camps in the blazing hot plains of Mardan, Swabi and Charsada in the summer of 2009, this they did to give the army legroom to take the militants head-on under the operation Raah-e-Raast, which started in May 2009.

Alas. Nobody at the helm of affairs here learnt a lesson after the worst ever years. It seems corruption along with sloth has mingled in the blood of the police, district officials in every department including the district courts.

Peace is the only option for us all. It cannot be jeopardised by corruption, ineligibility and bad governance in Pakistan, particularly in the scenic valley of Swat.