Daily Times

“The Pashtun tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress….Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud…. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid.”

(Winston Churchill)

The Americans won their Wild West through a combination of cruelty and artifice and then celebrated their success in televised shows like “How the West was won?” I wish we do the same albeit with a caveat. We would like our victory over the hearts and not on the battlefields alone. Why and how it could be done would be explained in the subsequent parts of the article. We have been engaged in this fratricidal conflict in tribal areas since last 16 years and have come close to achieving an end to the kinetic part of the conflict. Or have we? The questions as to the success and the sustainability of our FATA campaign would remain agitating our minds till we bring a real closure to this longest tribal war in our history. According to Johan Galtung’s concept we have already achieved the negative peace in our tribal areas.

The negative peace is the absence of war which has been ensured through the blood and self- immolating deeds of over 8000 officers and soldiers belonging to security forces. The positive peace i.e the absence of the causes of war that lead to permanent peace still eludes us. Pakistan has partially achieved the ends of positive peace by eliminating militant sanctuaries, restoring peace, and rebuilding the infrastructure for displaced war affectees from the FATA.In order to determine the measure of our success in this war against terror in FATA, we need to understand the nature of the threat challenging the state in FATA. Since the British times the tribal areas have remained the battleground pitting the British Indian Army against the refractory and truculent tribesmen.

The recipe for winning our war in West lies in winning hearts and minds of the tribesmen. The FATA population should not be alienated and the merger should also be effected incrementally, instead of ramming down alien customs and laws down their throats without shaping the environment for merger

The threat to the British was the Tzarist Russia’s ingress into the British Indian Empire’s area abutting Afghan border and to mitigate it they built a chain of frontier fortresses, to fight the tribesmen not submitting to British terms. There are areas in seven ex agencies of FATA where the British could not penetrate and therefore were compelled to establish alliances with the local tribes in return for certain privileges for the tribes. The pacification of tribes in FATA consumed a huge portion of British Indian army’s time and resources. The perpetual wars in tribal areas forced the British to keep a forward presence in northern western part of subcontinent establishing Headquarters of Northern Command at Rawalpindi, followed by a string of military training and logistic installations along the Western border with Afghanistan. The best and the brightest were sent to cut their military teeth and have their baptism of fire in tribal areas.

Writers like Rudyard Kipling explained the brutality of the tribal warfare in romantic terms like,”A scrimmage in a Border Station-A canter down some dark defile-Two thousand pounds of education, Drops to a ten rupee Jezail”. The British paid heavy price for their frontier efforts. Compared to British Indian Army that had the full support of the entire Indian subcontinent and the British Army Pakistan Army has fared better in FATA being the only army that has actually defeated the militants in those tribal areas. The British Army under Brigadier General Neville Chamberlain, in October 1863, attacked Ambela Pass to punish Bunerwals in Malka. 15000 tribesmen gathered to attack 6000 British Indian Army soldiers comprising infantry and cavalry regiments on famous Craig’s Picket and Eagle Nest posts atop the Ambela Pass. The British ultimately achieved a pyrrhic victory at the cost of 1000 men and a wounded General Chamberlain. The battle produced the maximum Victoria Crosses given to the British Indian Army in any single battle.

Pakistan Army contrarily ran through the South Waziristan in a record time of less than two months from October to December 2009 during Operation Rah-e- Nijaat. Similarly in Operation Sherdil in Bajaur launched by Frontier Corps supported by army, over 2700 militants including 321 foreign fighters were killed at the cost of 20 own casualties. The question arises as to what led to those spectacular Pakistani successes where a super power of its times i.e the British Empire had failed. The answer lies in tribal support. While the tribes on the whole in FATA were not against Pakistan Army, except some militants, the same tribes down to women and children were against the British. If the tribes had turned against us the game would have been over in FATA.

The recipe for winning our war in West lies in winning hearts and minds of the tribesmen. The FATA population should not be alienated and the merger should also be effected incrementally, instead of ramming down alien customs and laws down their throats without shaping the environment for merger. The old hands in tribal administration should be coopted in civil administration and a benign yet effective heir to the office of Political Agent should be created for administering the tribal areas. Political engagement with the local tribes should be done immediately to assuage their genuine grievances borne out of a long standing war weariness.

The war weary tribesmen comprising a vast multitude of internally displaced refugees need rehabilitation. The most pressing requirement of the tribal areas is the health, education and the security. The most pressing tribal instinct born out of centuries of conflict is survival. The tribes would change loyalties to support whosoever provides them the vital needs for their cultural and material survival. In the past some egregious mistakes were made by the state. These included neglect of development in tribal areas and letting pro Pakistan Maliks get overwhelmed by the violent religious terrorists like Mullah Fazalullah, Baitullah Masud and Hakeemullah Masud.

The state needs to reintroduce the “Sandeman Policy” i.e co-opting the willing acquiescence of the tribes into a cooperative relationship with the state, through tribal hierarchy, employing development and cultural integration as the pacification tools. Pakistani state should have no problem in winning the tribes over through political engagement of tribal leadership and development of the areas, targeting human security. Where the British failed we could only succeed if we own them as our people and they own us as their people.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST