Sensitive complexity

There is no plug-and-play solution to the interlocking difficulties that require resolution if the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) are ever going to come into the mainstream of governance. Ideas and proposals regarding the future of the seven agencies that make up Fata have come and gone over decades. Today there is a two-steps-forwards-and-one-step-backwards process that will eventually lead to a merger of Fata with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. This is far from being a foregone conclusion and there are powerful political voices that are opposed to the merger — or indeed much in the way of changes to the status quo beyond the replacement of the much-hated and reviled Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR).

A recent step forward has been the decision by the federal cabinet on Tuesday 12^th September to approve the extension of the Supreme Court and the Islamabad High Court to all the Agencies in Fata. It is expected that the bill seeking to extend the jurisdiction of the superior courts will lead eventually to the abolition of the FCR. Pending that the cabinet has also agreed that ‘the normal laws of the country’ would be enforced in Fata ‘in a phased manner.’

There is ‘many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip’ goes the old saying, and potential slips abound with changes to Fata. The seven agencies have discrete cultures and are not necessarily all on the same page when it comes to development needs. There are massive infrastructure deficits — they are not directly linked agency-to-agency by road for one as terrain precludes — that are not going to be solved by pelting them with money. The proposed 10-year timeline for the changes is probably optimistic. It is going to take a new generation of men and women in the agencies to own and take forward the proposals, and some of those to do the taking forwards are probably as yet unborn. Above all there needs to be a widespread outbreak of common sense in the political playground, an eventuality that would be rare indeed. We wish well to the halting reform package, perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing this and governments of the future.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 14^th, 2017.

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