Grand Trunk Road

This OINN article says that Pakistan’s civilian administration under Prime Minister Gilani has decided to suspend peace negotiations with tribes along the Afghanistan border until the tribesmen agree to certain new conditions chief among them being the suspension of cross-border attacks into Afghanistan and the suspension of all aid to Al-Qaeda.

This article on the front page of the Daily Times says something completely different. According to it, the government and the Mehsud tribes are to sign a peace deal very soon, the initial draft of which was made available to the Daily Times on Thursday. According to this draft, the military will withdraw completely from the tribal areas after Baitullah Mehsud releases all captured military and paramilitary soldiers. The draft contains no clauses requiring the suspension of cross-border activities. The Mehsud tribe said they would be unable to agree to such a clause because they do not have a border with Afghanistan. (It’s hard to find a good map to illustrate this, but the area inhabited by the Mehsuds is right in the middle of South Waziristan). As for Al-Qaeda, the agreement “binds” the Mehsud clan to oust all Al-Qaeda militants within one month, but already includes a possible two month concession if it is not done within a month.

I noticed that most of the statements in the Daily Times article about this deal were given by NWFP governor Owais Ahmed Ghani. Ghani, one of Musharraf’s most trusted men, was the controversial governor of Balochistan from 2003 - 2008. In January 2008 he was appointed as the replacement for the governor of the NWFP Lt-Gen (retd) Ali Mohammad Jan Aurakzai who was the architect of the widely criticized September 5, 2006 peace deal between the government and the militants.

Pakistan Suspends Talks With Tribes on Afghanistan Border. Online International News Network. June 6, 2008.
Khattak, Iqbal. Army to leave Mehsud areas after deal inked. Daily Times. June 6, 2008.

This column¹ by Ahmed Rashid is almost a month old but it’s really interesting to consider it side-by-side with this one in today’s News by Khalid Aziz.
Rashid argues that the PPP-ANP coalition government of the Frontier has become needlessly bogged down in negotiations with local militants at the expense of formulating an over-arching strategy for the future of the tribal areas. Any successful long-term peace strategy will require the cooperation of the NWFP government, the military and the Afghan government. He prescribes many of the usually recommended reforms for FATA: massive spending on education to gradually replace the madrassah system and assisting in the return of the thousands of people who have been displaced by the army’s military actions in order to allow “a strong anti-Taliban and anti-extremist ethos to emerge among the Pashtun tribes.”

Aziz’s column² takes a much deeper look at the changing nature of civil society in FATA. He argues that the events following the US invasion of Afghanistan have deeply changed tribal society in FATA. For a number of reasons, Pakistan failed to act on its initial goal to integrate the tribal areas into the NWFP through development. Now, he says, it is if not too late, much more difficult:

However, like votaries of an extinct system, tribesmen still speak of protecting their customs and traditions. They still speak of following Pukhtunwali, which they proudly describe as their lar, or path for survival and salvation. However, they fail to see that all that has changed. The British failed to end tribalism in a hundred years, and Pakistan failed to do so in sixty years. However, the militants have succeeded in doing this in only seven.

Any plans to restore peace in the tribal areas will have to understand this change in order to be successful.

¹ Rashid, Ahmed. VIEW: How to succeed and fail in FATA —Ahmed Rashid. Daily Times. May 2, 2008.
² Aziz, Khalid. Impact of 9/11 war on tribal society. The News. June 1, 2008.