Selling FATA for pieces of silver

Before the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan and Afghanistan had lost their importance in the world community. It has been reported that once, before the 2001 attacks, a journalist asked George W Bush the name of Pakistan’s president and the former American president was simply stumped.

But after the fateful, paradigm-shifting collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, the world community started thinking about this part of the world – and started thinking about it much differently. The region gained ascendency in the world media, with journalists and analysts studying Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas very closely. One may claim that if the 9/11 brought miseries in the shape of warfare, collateral damage and internally displaced persons (IDPs), at the same time it catapulted Pakistan into the global spotlight, which in certain ways has been beneficial.

Foreign funding poured in for the IDPs in Pakistan. The world community, which now had a close insight into the Federally Administrative Tribal System (Fata), demanded reform in the tribal region’s stale administrative system.

However, these concerns have been exploited as well. Those locals who are sensitive to the concerns of the world community have organised NGOs to solicit funds from international organisations and have also struck lasting friendships with some media men whose only job is to posit Fata as an inaccessible area, which can only be salvaged by the NGOs in question. In the same vein, such exploiters blame the parliamentary representatives of Fata for corruption, so as to smear their image, and receive more international funds.

Some tribesmen of Fata, who initially lived in houses built of mud, now have offices and mansions in the elite areas of Islamabad and Peshawar since they started the ‘NGO business’. We regularly note that when the federal government announces the auditing of their incomes, they protest most vehemently.

The other types of NGOs who like to cash in on the global clamour for ‘reforms in Fata’ are busy organising workshops and seminars in the top hotels of Peshawar and Islamabad, with little emphasis on delivering on ground. Many of the ‘experts’ in these workshops and seminars have not even bothered to spend a single night in Fata, let alone do any comprehensive field work there. The tribal leaders and members of the Fata bureaucracy, who are involved in the day-to-day affairs of the region, are barely ever invited at these ventures.

One wonders who takes these NGOs seriously and why.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 7^th, 2014.