How did the situation in Swat change?
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In the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, on the bank of the river that courses through the Swat Valley, boys play soccer in a dusty field. When the Pakistani Taliban occupied this valley a decade ago, loyalists trudged to the same riverbank with their own television sets, setting them ablaze in a fiery rejection of Western culture.
But the Taliban embraced other broadcast technology, when it was useful. Yards away, tucked into the low-slung village of Imam Dherai, lies the rubble of a pirate radio station where a preacher, Fazal Hayat, known as Maulana Fazlullah, broadcast his vision of an Islamic utopia in the Swat Valley. Residents nicknamed the charismatic preacher "Mullah Radio." And that is how militants began inching across the Swat Valley in 2004: over the airwaves.
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