Pakistan in Media

No matter how successful the operation in South Waziristan, and no matter how hard and well the army fights (and it is doing both) the outcome is going to depend on political reform and the implementation of a string of promises and undertakings long-made and shortly neglected or forgotten. The military may be able to break the militants’ hold over the area but it is the civil administration that requires urgent reform if the whole process does not have to be re-done at some near-future date. The violence of both the militants and the army operations against them has undermined efforts aimed at economic development in the region; which was already a development desert before the current operation. A black economy in goods, drugs and weapons has flourished in the absence of inward investment that would provide an alternative livelihood to smuggling. There are no jobs that would attract a largely uneducated populace and it is little surprise that the militants find it easy to recruit and retain young men who see no future outside the possibly short but profitable life of jihad. The institutions of state are shored up by a grossly undemocratic and unrepresentative system run to their advantage by political agents and tribal maliks who are themselves increasingly dependant on the protection and patronage of the militants.

There has been some move forwards in that on 14th August 2009 President Zardari announced a reform package that if implemented in full would go some way to righting many wrongs and bringing opportunity to a part of Pakistan long denied it. Among other things it contained proposals to lift restrictions on political party activity, placed a restraining hand on the bureaucracy, particularly the arbitrary arrest and detention and collective punishments that were so often meted out; and excluded – at last – women and children from collective responsibility under the law. The government cannot in this case plead poverty as donors have given very considerable funding for development in FATA, but sadly much of this money is routed through unaccountable local institutions and disappears into the pockets of who knows who. To say that this is typical of the way we tend to manage these matters is a considerable understatement. There needs to be a recognition that those who are opposed to reform are not necessarily the gun-toting militants having an extended version of their own turf-wars played out for them, but the local elites, the civilian bureaucracies in all their various forms and, it has to be said, some elements of the military. All of these would lose both power and money if the people of FATA were to be granted their dues alongside the spread of constitutional and political rights to the area. Today we urge on our forces as they fight to bring the land back under the writ of the state, but if the land they win back is to be so incompetently and inequitably governed as it was before we committed lives and money to getting it back, then what was the point of the battle?