WAR has raged between the Pakistani Army and Taliban forces for several years now, spilling over from the tribal areas and Swat into the plains and cities of Pakistan.

As a result, Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi have all borne the brunt of attacks on security targets, with Pakistan’s children being the most affected by the conflict.

Karachi-based psychologist Ishma Alvi explains the psychological effects of the war on terror and related violence on Karachi’s children. “There has been a marked increase in anxiety disorders, especially generalised anxiety disorder as well as agoraphobia, the fear of going to spaces where the sufferer might feel threatened, where there appears to be little escape and where one might have a panic attack.”

She notes an increase in major depressive disorder, or clinical depression. “Not only have these disorders been appearing more frequently, they have been presenting in younger groups — teenagers to young adults.”

With 48 per cent of Pakistan’s population under the age of 18, and a small percentage of the budget allocated for education, chances are that extremism will continue to foment in the minds of young people faced with limited employment opportunities. According to Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, director of the Emmy-winning documentary Children of the Taliban, economic deprivation ensures that they will continue to turn to terrorism as a way of ensuring survival for their families.

Mindful of this ongoing threat, the Pakistan Army, during their 2009 operation in Swat, removed dozens of teenage boys who had been trained as suicide bombers from Taliban training camps. It enlisted Dr Feriha Peracha, a popular psychologist with a lucrative private practice in Lahore, to assess 12 of these boys. It was then proposed that she run a school aimed at rehabilitating them, and Dr Peracha agreed. Thirty-five children and teenagers were enrolled in this school, called Sabaoon, the Pushto word for the first ray of light in the morning.

The school was heavily guarded, and remotely located — security a top priority for such a delicate operation. The programme was administered by Dr Peracha’s organisation, the Unicef-funded Hum Pakistani Foundation. The programme included mainstream academic intervention and vocational training “for those who are unable to keep up with academics but continue with education at their own individual levels of achievement, starting with basic literacy”, says Dr Peracha.

Classroom education was supplemented with nature expeditions, art and drawing sessions and time to play sports, in order to give the boys a taste of the childhood that was snatched from them during the Taliban occupation of their villages and towns and their time in the training camps.

Religious academic and Swat University vice chancellor Dr Mohammed Farooq Khan visited the school once a week to teach the boys an Islam free from the distortions the Taliban had taught them. Undoing the damage inflicted upon the boys’ psyches — the five-point programme of indoctrination — was going to take months, if not years.

Rather than interrogating them or laying blame for their willingness to kill in the name of God, Dr Khan treated them as children who had undergone major psychological trauma, and attempted to educate and counsel them, helping them to understand how the Taliban had distorted their perceptions of religion and the West.

Sabaoon received media attention for its groundbreaking efforts and seemed to be off to a good start. Even the most severely indoctrinated children had begun to understand that the version of Islam previously taught to them was an ideology that encouraged death and destruction in their once peaceful valley. Then, one day in October 2009, the Taliban came to Dr Khan’s clinic and shot him in the head as he ate lunch with his assistant.

The murder has been linked to the ideological changes that Dr Khan had been attempting to institute in Swat University, which had become a hotbed of religious extremism during the days of the Taliban invasion of Swat, but his death had direct repercussions for Sabaoon and the boys in the school’s care.

“He was with me just two days before at the school,” says Dr Peracha, “and I had given some books to him about empathy training and requested him to use the parables and other narratives from the Quran to teach the same concept to the boys....”

Dr Peracha acknowledges the vacuum created by Dr Khan’s death, but it has not deterred her from her mission. She has hired another expert religious scholar as well as regular Islamic studies teachers to continue the work of Dr Khan, as she feels that the combination of religious education and psycho-social intervention is key to saving her charges from a path that no child should ever have to tread.

While danger continues to be a constant companion for Pakistan and its people, the key to surviving its psychological onslaught is to cultivate a place of safety within. Ishma Alvi urges parents to talk honestly to their children about the events and circumstances around them. She adds that parents must endeavour to keep calm in the moments of crisis that regularly erupt in Karachi and elsewhere in Pakistan’s restive cities. “That doesn’t mean they should fake calm, but that they should maintain calm despite fear.”

So many Pakistanis born in the age of the war on terror have died in these 10 years that it’s easy to imagine Pakistan as haunted by the children who never made it through the decade between Sept 11, 2001 and the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. But after the ones that have died, including the 160 children the UK-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism claims have been killed in US drone strikes since 2004, it’s the children who lived through and still live within the conflict areas that are the hardest-hit victims of the war and its violent blowback throughout Pakistan.