Integrating Fata

The long-awaited Fata merger with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is delayed yet again. Although there is a near-total consensus among the people – from the tribal areas and their cousins in the settled areas – the government has failed to live up to its own promises, feeding avoidable restlessness among the six million inhabitants of the region.

Following thorough groundwork through a committee that was set up by the government, the merger should have been a smooth process. Like everything else in Pakistan, the process is being deliberately snowballed into a controversy to cause a policy paralysis for mere politicking and petty gains.

More than 70 years after attaining independence, Fata is still governed by the retrograde and inhuman Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) that was formulated with the singular aim to contain Pakhtun opposition to the British colonial authority. A colonial relic, it should have been long abandoned as it adheres to such medieval practices as collective punishment with no recourse to appeal or oversight against injustices meted out by bureaucrats with scant understanding of dispensation of justice. The area has deliberately been locked in a time capsule – a sort of Neverland – where nothing virtuous grows but the damaging legacy of the colonial past that haunts generation after generation of restless youth.

Long before the US-led ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan and beyond, these areas had been designated as ilaqa ghair – alien territory – in public and official imagination. This loaded description created an atmosphere of permanent fear and distance, conjuring up images of dread and hostility against a population that was too poor and depleted to pose any challenge to the industrialised might of the state. These areas have been left to the mercy of the elements and the stranglehold of political agents to seek obedience and obeisance on behalf of a centre that was unwilling to offer any social contract and its attendant securities but still demanded compliance. This mindset of the political and bureaucratic elite and their continued remoteness towards people’s sufferings stands as the biggest impediment to the development and integration of the region.

This differentiation has increasingly drawn attention of the local people who have woken up to demand their full rights on a par with others. The ongoing deadlock is widely seen as lack of concern and compassion for the continued sufferings of the people of the region. Reflecting the sentiment from the ground, Ghalib Khan, a PML-N MNA from Fata told a newspaper last year that “successive governments had ignored tribesmen and those in power only sought to benefit themselves and their parties”.

The ongoing war for over a decade has caused wide-scale ruin, further compounding the situation. ‘Integration into the mainstream’ seems an easy and long-lasting solution, a position supported by a large section of the population. According to a recent report by the Fata Research Centre, an Islamabad-based think-tank, 74 percent people want to merge with KP.

Despite massive support from all political parties – barring Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s JUI-F and Mehmood Khan Achakzai’s marginal group, the PkMAP – the indecisiveness of the government illustrates its failure to prioritise issues of strategic importance. For Pakistani politicians a time-tested refrain to run away from responsibility and owning failures is to blame everything on ‘outside interference’, a thinly veiled reference to intervention and restriction that supposedly issues unabated from the military barracks. The recent statement by Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, supporting Fata’s integration under the leadership of a civilian setup, strengthens the government to take a decisive step as recommended by the Sartaj Aziz Committee.

Although Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi has reiterated his government’s resolve to support the merger, the unnecessary delay only serves to further erode political authority. This will likely enhance the power vacuum, which might generate pressure on the judiciary to fill it through its increasingly active interest and role in delivering instruction and advice on executive functions of the government. In the past, the courts have offered relief to people in Balochistan against the FCR which was applied to some parts of the province until a Supreme Court decision nullified it in 1993. The judgment declared that “describing people [as] ‘tribal’ does not justify denying them the same rights as every other citizen”.

Fata is at the heart of the new great game by the competing powers in the region and beyond. The past infamy that the region was a terrorist sanctuary with little or no state writ has been used to justify extra-judicial measures such as drone attacks that targeted people without distinction, killing hundreds of innocent people. This fuelled massive outrage that produced a continued wave of terrorism till Operation Zarb-e-Azb was able to largely terminate the challenge and return the area back to some order. The growing perception that politics is about securing electoral fiefdoms than securing public and strategic interests will only endanger the hard-won security and strategic balance in the region.

Under these circumstances, the worries that the failure to initiate the Fata reforms could increase chances of extremism and terrorism are becoming dangerously salient. Last week, the US raised concerns that Pakistan could lose territory to terrorists. The claim seems quite outlandish given the scale of successes against terrorism in the last few years. However, the dangers remain. Following the US claim, pamphlets of unknown origin appeared in South Waziristan warning people against music and dance.

Postscript: Mualana Fazlur Rehman, in his opposition to mainstreaming Fata, has invoked Kashmir, something he rarely does in his capacity as the Chairman of the Kashmir Committee. He likened the Durand Line to the Line of Control and claimed that the people in Fata and Kashmir face similar afflictions. Earlier, in January, his man in Fata Mufti Abdul Shakoor Betani said that the proposal of integrating Fata into KP was part of a “foreign agenda”.

Twitter: @murtaza_shibli