AS I enter the premises, a security guard holding a sub-machine gun greets me. He looks tired, annoyed and uninterested. “Maybe it is because of the difficult and mundane job he has,” I think to myself as I move further in, to a pathway that leads to a large courtyard.

Right above me, I see two freshly built, unpainted watchtowers overlooking the front street. The boundary wall has been built upon itself to make it higher and has been further secured with spanking new barbed wires.

One side of the courtyard occupies leftover material from the recent construction, with bricks and cement bags still lying around. Next to the courtyard is the monitoring room for the recently installed CCTV surveillance system.

It feels like a military bunker, but this is how schools in Peshawar have become after the December school attack by the proscribed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that left 131 students dead.

But are these measures satisfactory? It appears not, as I investigate more.

Mohammad Alamgir, the principal of this school, gives me a tour starting from the CCTV monitoring room. Did the promised funds from the government arrive, I ask?

“Not yet. I dipped into other funds like the student and medical funds, etc. With very little resources, I managed it since I did not want the children to come back to an unsafe environment,” says Mr Alamgir.

At this point in time, the CCTV monitor screens shut down due to a power cut.

“We have no backup,” he says apologetically. My next question is about the expertise of the security staff.

“The guards on duty and watching the surveillance are the school staff like the gardener, the cook, the peon, etc from our school. We could not afford to hire private security,” he adds.

One of the guards, who was holding the SMG at the entrance and wore an exhausted look when I walked in, is standing nearby. The principal points to him and tells me he used to be the office peon at the school.

I walk up to him to inquire of his new assignment.

“I have never held a gun in my life. They gave me training just for a day,” the peon-turned-guard Salim Masih complains. “I don’t want to do this job. When the school reopened after the winter break, I was told I have to do this now,” he adds.

Besides these unsafe security measures, Mr Alamgir and three teachers at his school have also decided to arm themselves, in the wake of the government decision to relax laws for carrying weapons to schools, a policy that also involved training school staff but was suspended after the bad press it received.

The principal takes me to his room where he keeps the gun locked in a drawer under his table. As he takes it out, I ask him if it is loaded and he responds with a hearty laugh and adds, “Of course! If you want to fight back the terrorists, you have to be ready!” he says as he unloads and then quickly loads the pistol and looks at me for a compliment on his gun-handling skills.

“If they come for me or my students, I will have no regrets dying because I know I fought back,” Mr Alamgir says while waving the gun. And then quotes a verse from the Quran that mentions jihad.

I remind him of Bacha Khan (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan), who is said to have started the non-violent Khudai Khidmatgar movement against the British from this very city of Peshawar, which is now heavily militarised.

But I can already see him shaking his head in disapproval. “Bacha Khan is not our hero. He was a friend of the Hindus. He did not believe in Pakistan,” the principal says, rejecting to recognise Bacha Khan’s historic struggle for independence.

However not everyone agrees with the principal’s ideology. Like Sheraz Ahmed, who studies here in class 10. “Teachers are supposed to fight with the pen, not with guns,” he says when asked about seeing guns around him.

The provincial government reportedly pledged seven billion rupees to enhance the security of schools but observers feel that it is the militarised mindsets so widely entrenched that need to change if Pakistan’s policymakers are serious about combating terrorism.

“When you weaponise a society instead of getting rid of terrorism, the overall violence increases, as we are already witnessing in the country,” says Dr Ijaz Khan, who teaches at Peshawar University. “And this is not the first time they are going for such policies. The terrorism that we fight today is a result of similar policies of militarising the population in the past,” he concludes, predicting worse times ahead.

Published in Dawn, February 15th, 2015

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