Lack of information

We don’t have accurate information about Fata because successive govts were not interested in understanding the region

The Pakistan Army’s integrated operation Zarb-e-Azb, with its usual Islamised nomenclature, has been underway in North Waziristan now for almost two months. A vague and confusing situation is created in the country whereby the tribal area is represented as a haven of militants and the tribal people as beasts who gave shelter to the militants. An effective process of isolation of the tribal areas has created a situation whereby the tribal people are represented as one “militant group” — either as active militants or as supporters indicted to be punished — and this has gone largely unchallenged. What is striking is the lack of basic information about Fata in Pakistan’s public sphere.

Let us take a seemingly minor but very telling example: population in the North Waziristan Agency. According to Fata’s official website, the population of North Waziristan is 361,246, while according to a recent interview of the Federal Minister for States and Frontier Regions (SAFRON), Lt General (R) Abdul Qadir Baloch and other media sources, the number of IDPs is 800,000. According to other unconfirmed sources, this number has passed one million, while approximately 100,000 people went to Afghanistan. The agency hasn’t been evacuated completely. In fact, only two areas, Miramshah and Dattakhel, have apparently been evacuated. Another area, Shawal, is being asked to evacuate now by the military. The rest of the agency is almost untouched or at least officially not asked for evacuation. The number of IDPs is confusing and misleading at the same time because it doesn’t match the actual population of the area. The actual number is actually almost thrice of what is being reported.

Precisely, what proportion of the population evacuated and who still remains there? These are important questions that require serious consideration for two reasons. One, to be able to understand the true impact of the ongoing military operations in the region and two, to be able to understand long-term changes in the region with recourse to data rather than just opinion.

The army claims to have killed more than 400 militants so far, but who are they, what are their profiles, which organisations were they part of? It is almost impossible to verify and the authenticity of the claims made by the ISPR about the identity of the people killed so far and it will remain just that — claims — until independently verified by the media. The media is relying primarily, if not solely, on the government and security agencies’ sources and according to a recent research, the national media used 67 per cent either military or other government agencies’ sources for Fata-related news, prior to the operation.

We don’t have accurate information about Fata because for many decades, successive governments were not interested in understanding the region, or because they actively wished to construct an image of Fata as an unruly, wild place within Pakistan but yet outside of it. What we can ascertain right away is that this lack of basic demographic data about the tribal areas has allowed the military considerable flexibility in carrying out various kinds of operations, overt and clandestine, over the last decade.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 29^th, 2014.

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