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Racing Time and Taliban to Rebuild in Pakistan

NAZARABAD, Pakistan — The fighting is over and the villagers have returned, but life here remains suspended. Villagers’ buffaloes are gone, and their harvests are spoiled. Power is still out in many areas. Schools, blown up by the Taliban, lay in heaps. Even the bricks have been sold.

We are orphans,” said Akbar Khan, a school principal. “No one has come to ask about us.”

This is the upper Swat Valley, ground zero for the Taliban in northern Pakistan. While urban areas farther south are bustling and back to life, the real test of Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban in Swat will take place here, in the impoverished villages where the militant movement began.

But more than two months after the end of active combat, with winter fast approaching, reconstruction has yet to begin, and little has been accomplished on the ground to win back people’s trust, villagers and local officials say.

The lag, they argue, is risky: It was a sense of near-total abandonment by the government that opened people to the Taliban to begin with, they say, and the longer people are left to fend for themselves, the greater the chance of a relapse.

“I’m really worried,” said Javed Iqbal, the chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province, where Swat is located. “We do not have the luxury of time.

“If you don’t start showing something more tangible,” he continued, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see the state of anarchy returning.”