Major General Hassan Azhar Hayat makes an unlikely trailblazer for women’s liberation.
A battled-hardened commander in the Pakistani army, he has spent the last eight years in the rugged tribal zone of North Waziristan, a notorious stronghold of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
From his base in the main town of Miranshah, he speaks about how more than 800 of his men have died in the two-year operation to bring peace to the region.
But as he hops into his car for a guided tour around town, his war-weary tone lightens up as he talks about his new counter-insurgency tactic. It doesn’t involve guns or tanks, but needles, thread and mixing bowls. And the opening salvo will take place at a newly-built school, which will soon be running embroidery and cooking classes.
"We’re hoping to get women to enrol so that they can go on to set up their own boutiques and maybe even cafes," beams Gen Hassan. "Women didn’t used to run businesses in this part of the world – we’re trying to change that."
Whether any local menfolk will try to enrol in the classes remains to be seen. Gun-loving and religiously conservative, North Waziristan’s tribesmen are not known for their interest in sewing, much less for sharing classrooms with women.
All that, though, may now be about to change.
For by introducing these remote corners of Pakistan to the values of the 21st century, the army hopes to challenge the very culture that gave the militants a foothold in the first place.
North Waziristan, a region of jagged, lunar mountains on the Afghan border, is a case in point. It lies in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas – or Fata, the government’s acronym for the vast chunk of north-west Pakistan that has never submitted to their rule, or anyone else’s.
The origins of the Fata stretch back to the 19th century, when even the British Empire found the local Pashtun tribes too fierce to control. Ever since, they have been largely self-governing, with tribal jirgas, or courts, replacing the law of the land.
But when Taliban and Al Qaeda militants flooded over the Afghan border after the US-led invasion in 2001, that hands-off approach helped North Waziristan become a terrorist safe haven. Not only did locals respect the militants’ piety and fighting prowess, their ancient tribal hospitality code forbade them to hand them over to anyone else.
So it was that Miranshah, just ten miles over the border from Afghanistan, became a "Terrorist Pentagon", as Gen Hassan puts it.
Untroubled by prying eyes, the militants hatched several major bomb plots against the West here, including the so-called "liquid bomb" plot to blow up transatlantic airliners.
The town’s high-walled compounds served as jails for kidnapped westerners, and for many years, it was one of the CIA’s best guesses as to where Osama bin Laden was hiding.
Adding to Washington’s frustration was the suspicion that Islamabad itself was turning a blind eye, seeing the extremists as a useful loose cannon against India.
But all that changed in 2014, when growing levels of home-grown terrorism – including the Pakistani Taliban’s massacre of 132 children at a military-run school in Peshawar – saw the army declare all-out war on militants.
Gen Hassan now claims to have driven the militants almost completely from North Waziristan, uncovering a huge bomb factory in Miranshah in the process. But with much of the town destroyed during the fighting, he is using the opportunity to rebuild life here from scratch.
As well as new schools, hospitals and clinics, there is a brand-new cricket and football stadium, while in place of dirt tracks are concrete roads, cutting journey times from days to hours. A technical college is also being built, giving people a chance to earn a living legitimately.

Source: The National