The federal government imposed governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on October 11, at the same time it came up with a very extraordinary measure of imposing an emergency administrative structure for 12 districts including all eight former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and four adjacent settled districts in south, including Dera Ismail Khan, Tank, Bannu and Lakki Marwat.

The emergency administrative structure has been named as the Area Representation and Development Council (ARDC), which has 48 nominated members composed of tribal elders and local representatives (four from each of the 12 districts). The council is chaired by former KP Governor Shaukatullah Khan with Malik Khan Marjan is vice chairman, formed via local consultations and jirga mechanisms. In order to govern the 12 districts an Area Development Secretariat (ADS) has also been established under bureaucrat Yahya Akhundzada as the additional chief secretary and administrator. The secretariat has been given extensive powers over law enforcement, administration, and development funds. To monitor the council a Federal Supervisory Committee, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar, has been formed.

It remains to be seen how the ARDC would perform and what difference it may make in satisfactorily governing the former FATA districts. However, for developing these areas the council needs to have a comprehensive development strategy. It must be recalled that since the 2018 merger of erstwhile Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in KP province there have been various claims by governmental authorities at the highest levels that peace has been fully restored in the long-restive now known as Merged Tribal Districts (MTDs) of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. There have been indications that the official contention has serious shortcomings. But the regrouping and resurging of terrorist and militant groups, like Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), in the last couple of years in the tribal districts suggests otherwise.

One must keep the fact in view that the situation in the region comprising the MTDs has historically been so unpredictable that terms like ‘peace’ and ‘development’ etc. should be very cautiously used. Then the nature of the conflict in the tribal areas, straddling along Pakistan’s western borders, has been so complex that one cannot say with certainty about peace and its sustainability. At the moment we can say that peace is far from having been restored there.

It must be understood that critically-needed development in the tribal region is dependent upon sustainable peace there and it is a guarantee of continuous peace there. Against this backdrop, the regrouping of militant and terrorists in MTDs is quite understandable but concerning. The tribal region has faced continuous violence and conflict during the last two decades. This has mainly been a political, legal administrative and governance vacuum in the tribal region which has given birth to a multidimensional conflict and crisis there. This vacuum, in turn, was the upshot of the indeterminate status of FATA. For instance, the Constitution of Pakistan of 1973 recognised FATA as an integral part of the country but at the same time the law of the land was inapplicable to the region. Instead the British colonial period legal framework, Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR), was adapted to continue to regulate the affairs of the tribal areas. Successive governments and regimes paid little attention to address this legal and administrative inconsistency. It was in the dying days of the Pakistan Muslim League 2013-2018 government that the 25^th Constitutional Amendment was passed unanimously by the country’s parliament on May 30, 2018 to make former FATA part of KP. Though this merger was made in a hurry but after the merger there has been satisfactory improvement in the law and order situation, while the process of development leaves a lot to be desired. This proves the fact that the merger was not the only solution and there has always been a need for a comprehensive strategy to develop the hitherto extremely underdeveloped tribal region.

While development funds may be in the pipeline and some may have been spent but one does not see any real progress taking place in the tribal region on the ground. This is because of the fact that there is no comprehensive strategy for the development process in the districts in place, claims by government officials, particularly civilian bureaucrats, notwithstanding. Former PTI KP CM Mahmud Khan and current caretaker CM Azam Khan, himself a former bureaucrat, have been totally indifferent to the development of MTDs and left the affairs to the bureaucracy which has its own agenda of not developing the region.

On paper, there have been several development strategies with government departments like the Federal Ministry of State and Frontier Regions (SAFFRON) and KP Planning & Development Department but these documents have been largely inconsequential. In order to come up with a comprehensive strategy for the development of the tribal region and restoring of sustainable peace there one must look into the history and key reasons of the crisis and conflict in the region. The policies of our successive governments and military regimes have been responsible for the mess there. Former Pakistani strategists’ lack of farsightedness regarding the tribal areas could be gauged from the fact that they assumed that by leaving the region to itself to regulate its affairs and the issues arising out of the region would have no impact on the country. These strategists were fundamentally wrong and the events and incidents in the last two decades have proven it beyond an iota of doubt.

The militancy and terrorism emanating from former FATA has left the entire country insecure and resulted in a big death toll in the country’s war against terror, the highest death count in all the wars Pakistan has fought. Consequently, the Pakistan military had to launch large-scale operations in the tribal areas. The British colonial rulers wanted FATA to serve as a buffer region between mainland India and Afghanistan and beyond Czarist Russia and later Soviet Russia. Therefore, it did not institutionalize the region and tried to change the tribal character of the inhabitants of the people through civilized structures of governance. Unfortunately, successive Pakistani governments adopted the same policy and attitude towards the tribal areas. This attitude needs to be changed and the historical wrongs which our strategists and policy formulators committed with reference to the tribal areas needs to be rectified.

If we fail this time we cannot be prevented from a disaster of gargantuan proportions, which would make the entire country once again completely insecure. Our strategists must understand that the issues of MTDs are not isolated problems as they have large-scale negative consequences for the entire country. Where it has been terrorism, gun-running or smuggling of drugs or patronization of crimes and criminals and later militancy, the tribal regions have had an immensely negative impact on the security of entire Pakistan.

The only strategy which has been employed in the tribal region is to merge it with KP. While the merger was not desirable by any yardstick as it could not address the very issues, conflict and crisis in the tribal region it is now a fact. One does not have an iota of doubt that the merger was done in a haste just to transfer responsibility and to give an aura of change but the change has been cosmetic. Whether former FATA was merged or not with KP it was very much part of the province as the residents have always been dependent on the province. However, this dependence did not develop FATA, so how come it could develop it now?

Therefore, the government must understand the issues and although the NMDs are part of KP yet a totally different development strategy must be devised for the tribal region keeping in view the ground realities.