Peshawar – Gunfire rang out as Fatima Bibi squeezed off three shots, hitting her target every time. Then she lowered her Glock pistol, turned to her fellow academics and smiled.
Her instructor was smiling, too.
“These ladies are better shots than some of our men,” said Abdul Latif, a police firearms instructor. “They learned to handle a gun in just two days. Their confidence level is remarkable.”
Dangerous times call for unusual measures in northwestern Pakistan, where the police are offering firearms instruction to schoolteachers and university lecturers since the Taliban massacred 150 people at a Peshawar school in December.
Bibi was one of eight lecturers from the Frontier College for Women, a postgraduate college, who attended a two-day firearms course at the provincial police firing range last week.
They learned to load, aim and fire weapons ranging from pistols to assault rifles; they also discussed self-defense techniques, and how to defend their students if the Taliban stormed in during class.
“The Dec. 16 tragedy showed us that we need to learn to be able to take care of ourselves and our students,” said Naheed Hussain, an assistant professor, who took the course while still wearing her black teaching robe. “We will not replace our pens with guns. But the situation could arise where we are required to serve our country.”
The initiative for the gun lessons comes from the provincial government and the police authorities in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province as part of a push to increase security at schools. The province has borne the brunt of Pakistani Taliban attacks over the years.
Gun ownership is common across northwestern Pakistan, which is largely populated by ethnic Pashtuns and includes the restive tribal districts. But the advent of armed teachers has made uneasy many parents, who say it is the responsibility of the state, and not teachers, to protects schools and universities.
The notion of armed female teachers, in particular, has provoked consternation across conservative Pashtun society, raising a storm of protest that officials say could call the entire plan into doubt.
“How can we teach with a gun in one hand and a book in another?” asked Malik Khalid Khan, president of the All Primary Schools Teachers Association.
Abaseen Yusufzai, head of the Pashto department at Islamic College University, said, “This is the stupidest and most illogical thing that has happened in Pashtun society in living memory.”
“Women provide moral support, food and water to our warriors,” Yusufzai continued. “But never in our history have they been required to take up arms. It suggests that the men have lost their nerve, and the courage to fight.”
Security experts expressed skepticism about the ability of teachers to hold back Taliban militants, who are often primed with drugs when they wage suicide assaults, reports ndtv.com.
But the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa provincial government, which is controlled by the party of the firebrand opposition politician Imran Khan, says it has little choice but to use drastic measures.
Mushtaq Ghani, the provincial minister for education and information, said the province’s 65,000 police officers were not enough to secure its 45,000 schools, colleges and universities.
“This is an extraordinary time,” he told reporters last week. “We don’t want teachers to take up guns, but it is necessary in the circumstances.”
In addition to the possibility of armed teachers, the authorities have ordered schools to raise boundary walls and hire armed security guards – expensive measures that many schools say they cannot afford.
But Muhammad Atif, the minister for elementary education, said the government was redirecting $15 million in government money earmarked for school sanitary facilities and drinking water into the new security measures.
“There are 4,700 schools in this province that do not have boundary walls,” he said. “So let’s build walls first and think of toilets and drinking water later.”
Teachers themselves say they are conflicted – uncomfortable at the prospect of carrying a firearm, yet haunted by memories of the bloodshed at the Army Public School in December, when seven heavily-armed militants strode the corridors, flinging grenades and shooting down students.
“As I gripped the gun and opened fire I started to sweat, thinking I should have a pen in my hand and not a gun,” said Akhtar Nagina, a physics lecturer at the Frontier College for Women. “But then I remembered what the terrorists had done. And I figured I should at least have a gun in my purse, for my own protection.”