Understanding the FATA conflict:

1. A Brief Regional Account

Studying the phenomena of the rise of FATA’s and particularly Waziristan’s religiously-motivated radical militants in isolation from the recent history of this Afghan-Pakistan region is an exercise in futility. In fact, to fully understand the conflict and why the regional states (namely, Pakistan and Afghanistan) behave as they do towards each other and why, despite being two Muslim states with a shared heritage, they have continued to display open hostility towards each other throughout much of their history, one must also study the Durand Line agreement, which was signed between the British Empire and the Afghan king Abdur Rahman Khan as far back as 1893 but still has serious implications on Pak-Afghan relations today. It is also pertinent to explore why, as a result, Pakistan has traditionally allied itself with the religious and tribal anti-Kabul forces in Afghanistan  and why the Kabul governments have found a close ally in New Delhi . Without a complete historical context and a geo-political understanding of the region, grasping the nature of the current conflict in FATA and Afghanistan is impossible .



1.1 The founding of the Afghan State

Ahmed Shah Abdali established the first Afghan state in 1747 . Prior to that, various Afghan tribes had been migrating across the Indus River for the better part of a millennia and used to rule India from Delhi but they always abandoned their traditional homeland in the process, which lies in the area between the river Oxus in the north and the river Indus to the south. However, Ahmed Shah became the first Pashtun king who, despite having captured Delhi, returned to Kandahar and consolidated his rule at home. The core area of his empire comprised of modern day Afghanistan (except Kunduz and the newly acquired Uzbek and Tajik territory), the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the northern belt of Balochistan and the province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan. This is especially relevant because Ahmed Shah did not take power by force but was elected the king of all Afghans in a tribal council (Jirga) that had representation from all Afghan tribes and he was, therefore, the legitimate sovereign of all the Pashtun tribes . The peripheral areas of Ahmed Shah’s empire expanded much further in all directions – Mashhad (Iran) to the west and Punjab, Kashmir and Sind to the east and south.

However, years after his death, his empire grew feeble due to constant infighting and an increasing gap between the rulers and the ruled – the kings in Kabul (Ahmed Shah’s ancestors moved the Afghan capital from Kandahar to Kabul) tried modernizing Afghan society, only to face a fierce backlash from the populace. By -1814, they had lost Mashhad to Iran and Punjab and Sind had also been lost . Now the core of the Afghan state was at risk – the Russians were moving in from the north, Iran was eyeing the province of Herat and the winter capital, Peshawar, had been lost to the Sikh Empire of Ranjit Singh .



1.2 The Arrival of the British and the Durand Line

By 1849, the British Empire had arrived onto the scene and had defeated the Sikh Empire, reducing it to the status of a vassal. Therefore, Peshawar and its surrounding region fell into the hands of the British. The Afghans called upon the British to return Peshawar to them. The British Empire replied by waging war against Kabul in order to capture it but their mostly colonial army was annihilated in what was to become the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1839 . It was after the second Afghan War (1878) that the British signed the Durand Line agreement with the Afghan King Abdur Rahman Khan, in which all the areas starting from Gilgit in the north to Bolan in the south were taken over by the British Empire. The Afghan state lost nearly half of its population by this treaty and vast amounts of agricultural land .

To this day, Afghan governments claim that the Durand Line agreement was signed under duress and is therefore null and void. They also claim that the Durand Line was a mere buffer-zone between Afghanistan and the British Empire and it was never meant to be a permanent border. The implications of this are immense - the Afghan state still claims Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, FATA and northern Balochistan as part of its territory  not only on historical grounds but also due to the fact that the people inhabiting this area are Pashtuns, the same ethnic group as the majority of people in Afghanistan. It is precisely because of these claims that Islamabad is perpetually suspicious of Kabul and always seeks to install a pro-Pakistan government there in order to have a safer western border. Pakistan argues that under the principles of uti possidetis juris, Pakistan inherited the Durand Line agreement from the British Empire and it is still legal and valid.

In the midst of it all, India sees this as an opportunity to expand into Afghanistan (which is its enemy’s enemy) and to virtually surround Pakistan. Therefore, all the miseries of the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan can be traced back to this – the Afghans seeking their lost territory, Pakistan trying to secure and consolidate its hold on the territory that it inherited from the British Empire and India attempting to use Afghanistan to weaken Pakistan. Added to this mix now is the presence of NATO after the 9/11 attacks on New York. All this makes for a very volatile situation in which different state and non-state actors, though working together on the surface, may have completely conflicting interests at heart.



1.3 The Afghan War (1979-1989)

The 1970s were a period of great turmoil for both Pakistan and Afghanistan. In 1973, the Afghan king was deposed by his nephew, Sardar Daud, and an Afghan republic was announced. On the other hand, in Pakistan, the democratic government of Z.A. Bhutto was overthrown by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 and Martial Law was established. However, unlike Pakistan, Afghanistan was set to face even more turmoil.

Sardar Daud’s democratic reforms became unpopular amongst some rural Afghans  and some notable militants such as Gulbudin Hekmatyar and Burhanuddin Rabbani sought refuge in Pakistan , where they were trained and armed by the Pakistani army to go back into Afghanistan and start a movement to depose President Daud. Pakistan had its own quarrels with Daud, who supporting the Pashtunistan movement, which sought to reunite the Pashtun regions in Pakistan with Afghanistan. By 1975, militants started pouring into Afghanistan, albeit at a slow rate, to disrupt communications and conduct other terrorist operations. In an interview conducted by the Defense Journal magazine in 1998, General Naseerullah Babar confirmed the reports that Pakistan was supporting anti-government forces in Afghanistan as far back as six years before the Soviet intervention:

"In order to convey a message to Sardar Daud that we could play the same game and to assess the training level of the resistance, an operation was initiated in Panjsher Valley in August 1975. The operation was a total success. The Afghans suffered heavily in men and equipment…. In October 1973 while I was serving as ig fc an Afghan named Habibur Rahman (Shaheed) came and contacted me about setting up a resistance movement in Afghanistan with active military assistance of Pakistan. I conveyed the same to Mr Bhutto, who accepted my proposal in view of the changed situation in Afghanistan and asked me to organise training of Afghans….  Thus we established the base of Afghan Mujahideen resistance in 1973… "

In April 1978 things took a turn for the worse as Sardar Daud’s government was overthrown in Nur Mohammad Taraki’s Marxist coup, popularly known as the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA’s) Saur Revolution.  Taraki belonged to the parcham faction of the PDPA. However, in March 1979, Taraki was assassinated and Hafizullah Amin, a khalak member of the PDPA, took over power in Kabul. Amin believed in revolutionary terror and drastic changes and his reign resulted in anti-Kabul sentiments across Afghanistan .

By this time, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others at the helm of policy-making in the US had decided to set a “bear-trap” for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and create a “Vietnam” for them there. The following is an excerpt from a recent interview conducted by Le Nouvel Observateur:

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Weapons and financial support to the militants multiplied many folds by early 1979 and members of the Parcham faction of the PDPA, notably Babrak Kamal, held a series of meetings in Moscow, asking for the Red Army’s intervention in Afghanistan. The Soviets refused citing that their direct involvement would only worsen the situation in Afghanistan. However, by the winter of 1979, things had become so desperate for the Kabul government that the Soviets were ultimately compelled to send their 40th Army division under the Brezhnev Doctrine, with brigades of high numbers of predominantly Kazakh and Tajik troops into Afghanistan and hence, fell into the Americans’ trap.  Babrak Kamal, at the end of the day, was appointed as the Soviets’ puppet president in Kabul .

Support for the anti-Kabul Mujahideen came from all over the world – Egypt, the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc. With the weapons and money, indoctrinating material also poured in - children were trained and indoctrinated in their narrow ideological parameters of Islamic fundamentalism and sectarianism and not Afghan/ Pashtun nationalism . Pakistan got two birds with one stone here as not only was the specter of Pashtun nationalism defeated but the otherwise threatening state of Afghanistan was now reduced to poverty. By 1989, the Soviets had had enough and they packed up and left, leaving behind Dr. Najeebullah’s fragile socialist government in power.



1.4 The Afghan Civil War (1989-2001)

It was also at this time that the West lost interest in Afghanistan and all funding from them stopped after the Geneva Accords were signed in 1988 . This was also the time-period when the Pakistani military establishment wanted to ensure that Afghanistan would not rise again as a threat to Pakistan and the ISI’s director general Akhtar Abdul Rehman reportedly remarked that “Kabul must burn ”.  In fact, the turning into rubble of most of Afghanistan’s major cities happened not during the Soviet War but during the Afghan Civil War, during which rockets and artillery were fired within civilian areas with no care for human losses. Creating an opportunity from this potential disaster, Pakistan struck gold. Tired of the infighting in Afghanistan, a grassroots level movement began taking hold in Kandahar under Mullah Omar, who sought to end Afghanistan’s civil war and establish Shariah Law. However, his movement was not powerful enough to capture Kabul and the Taliban of Mullah Omar had to retreat after heavy losses in 1994 . Seizing the moment, the Pakistani army not only encouraged thousands of madrassah students to go and fight into Afghanistan but it also sent more than 28,000 regular Pakistani soldiers in civilian regalia to help the Taliban capture Kabul . By 1998, the Taliban controlled 80% of Afghanistan and Pakistan became the first country out of three to recognize the Taliban regime in Kabul. Thus, Pakistan not only installed a friendly government in Kabul but it also achieved strategic depth so that in case of an Indian attack on Pakistan, the Pakistani army would be able to fall back into Afghanistan and launch a counter-offensive from there.

It was from this point onwards that the otherwise secular Pakistani army became close allies with the fundamentalist militant forces of Afghanistan as an expedience for its policies vis-à-vis India. Not only were the Taliban armed and trained by the Pakistanis but even their salaries came out of the Pakistani budget. In fact, many fighters trained in Afghanistan would now be sent to Kashmir to pressurize India to come to the negotiation table. As time would prove, this was a most deadly alliance, especially for Pakistan.



1.5 9/11 and the retreat of the Taliban into Pakistan

The last part in the introduction of this study deals with the effects of 9/11 on Afghanistan and the now close relations between Pakistan and the Taliban.

The 9/11 attacks were carried out by Al-Qaeda, an organization of mostly Arab fighters that had taken refuge with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The Taliban are, therefore, not guilty of the 9/11 attacks. However, since the Taliban refused to hand over Al-Qaeda leaders to the US, they were attacked by NATO in October 2001 and within days, most of the Taliban slipped across into Pakistan through the porous and mountainous region of Tora Bora     . It is believed that they were also accompanied by senior Al-Qaeda figures at that time.

Believing that the Taliban had been defeated, the US shifted its focus on Iraq and mistakenly elevated Afghanistan to the status of an accomplished mission. On the surface, Pakistan had shown great support for George Bush’s war on terror but, as further analyses on the matter reveal, Pakistan never really broke off its links with the Taliban.



1.6 Pakistan’s Dual-Policy and the Taliban’s entrance into FATA

One of the lesser known incidents of the 2001 Afghan War but one which has severe implications and is very telling is the Kunduz Airlift incident. Just as Kunduz was about to fall into the hands of the Northern Alliance, Pakistan got into a diplomatic emergency mode, trying to ensure the safety of its citizens there . Soon afterwards, military aircraft landed at the Kunduz Airport and airlifted hundreds of Taliban fighters from the scene . According to the Pakistanis, they were airlifting some Pakistani military personnel  who were there as advisors to the Taliban but according to eyewitness and other intelligence reports, many Taliban and Al-Qaeda commanders had also boarded those flights . The actions of Taliban and foreign fighters who had fled put Pashtun civilians in Kunduz in danger – many human rights abuses were caused against them by the now marauding Northern Alliance militants .

This incident is most telling in the sense that it shows in a nutshell how Pakistan, despite having joined the war on terror, would not compromise on what it believed was its national interest, which, in this case, was support for the Taliban militants who, Islamabad believes, will eventually come into power in Kabul after the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. As the Associated Press reports, this fear is shared by others as well – “… the problem is especially acute because Washington is committed to withdrawing most of its combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Seeing the country fall back into the hands of the Taliban or descend into bloody civil war would be a crushing failure for Washington”.



1.7 Taliban gain entry into FATA

The Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA)’s seven agencies are home to over three million tribesmen, who have maintained limited internal autonomy even after 1947. They intermarry, trade and feud with one another as well as tribes from the other side of the Durand divide . Within themselves, they settle affairs according to Pashtunwali, an ancient, pre-Islamic tribal code of conduct. However, their governance is directly in Islamabad’s control, which appoints political agents (PA) to administer the tribes under the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), a strict penal code devised by the British in 1901 . A militia called the Frontier Constabulary (FC) maintains peace in the agencies.

FATA, therefore, remains the most backward area of Pakistan, along with Balochistan, and none of the seven agencies of the region boast a single university . The tribesmen traditionally enjoyed no civic rights until 2011, when voting rights were granted to them and conservative parties are expected to be popular there. The area has also been kept off-limits to NGOs and human rights organizations. Additionally, FATA has proved itself effectively, first for the British Empire and then Pakistan, as a buffer zone by blocking the impact of social and cultural reforms introduced in Afghanistan by the modernist king Amanullah Khan and preventing these from entering eastern Pashtun society. Similarly, Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s political movement remained confined to eastern Pashtuns and could not penetrate Afghanistan as a result of FATA . The most popular regional party is the conservative JUI-F.

Since it has been established that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants had been evacuated from Afghanistan within a month of NATO’s bombing, the question that follows is, “but where to?” The answer is simple – most of them escaped to Waziristan and Quetta .

However, an even more important question is that of Pakistan’s role in this mass-exodus or movement of militants in its territory. Divergent views exist on the matter, ranging from arguments about Pakistan’s ignorance on the matter to Pakistan’s complete support for these militants. Nevertheless, the existing evidence suggests that not only were no forces deliberately deployed alongside the Tora Bora and Waziristan area on the Pakistani side so as to facilitate the entry of the Taliban into the tribal regions  but in some cases, especially along the Quetta area, the Frontier Corps troops did not take any action against scores of militants coming in. The rationalization for supporting such difficult and sometimes uncontrollable elements comes from the need to install a friendly government in Kabul and keep pro-India political leaders at bay in Afghanistan .

In any case, it is unfathomable to believe that so many thousands of Uzbek, Tajik and Arab fighters managed to settle into FATA and particularly, Waziristan, without the knowledge of the Pakistani authorities. Unlike what is popularly believed, Islamabad exerts a great deal of control and influence over FATA. The presence of even one foreign and unwanted person reaches the ear of Islamabad’s directly-appointed autocrat (known as a Political Agent) very quickly in every agency of FATA. In the 1980s, Amanullah, a former Pakistani parliamentarian was wanted for drug smuggling charges. In order to escape from the authorities, he fled to Waziristan to seek refuge with the tribes there. The Political Agent threatened to enforce the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) against any clan that gave him refuge. According to the FCR, an entire clan will be jailed and punished if even one of its members is involved in any sort of criminal behavior. This collective punishment mechanism was inherited by Islamabad from the British Empire, which was given a tough time by the tribes of the seven FATA agencies. Needless to say, no clan was ready to give refuge to Amanullah under the principle of melmastia (hospitality). Within weeks, Amanullah surrendered himself to the authorities.

Furthermore, many foreign journalists and researchers make the mistake of completely misunderstanding melmastia and nanawati. In C. Christine Fair and Chalk’s opinion, melmastia means “unconditional hospitality” and thus “may help explain why FATA has given a geographic space that has been open and receptive to the influx of foreign Islamists ”. However, according to Pashtun traditions, nanawati (forgiveness) can only be given to parties that are seeking forgiveness and unconditionally surrender themselves to the other party and melmastia (refuge) can only be given if the refuge-seeking party gives up its arms and accepts the conditions of the hosts. In both cases, forgiveness and hospitality/refuge are neither unconditional nor are they granted to everyone who seeks them. In any case, none of these conditions were met with Al-Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s influx into FATA . Instead of giving up their arms, the Uzbek, Tajik, Arab and Taliban militants in FATA became de facto rulers and challenging their writ resulted in a swift death for any local tribesman.

In fact, to this day, no tribal council (Jirga) has sat down and allowed Al-Qaeda and the Taliban melmastia in FATA . In fact, in order to create a power vacuum and crush any sort of opposition to their forced entry into FATA, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, with the consent and support of the ISI, killed more than 1,500 tribal leaders as well as countless numbers of the anti-Taliban ANP acvitists in FATA shortly after their arrival . Most of the surviving tribal leadership of FATA thence migrated, in some cases permanently, to D.I. Khan, Peshawar, Islamabad and Karachi.

To date, the Pakistani policy in FATA or in the war on terror can be summed up as thus: make peace with the militant groups, those militant groups that want autonomy should be attacked and weakened until they want to make peace and to capture mid-level al-Qaeda members to keep the United States pleased.



1.8 The Information Squeeze in FATA

With all of that, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were given a free hand in FATA, where they trained, made recruitments and indulged in different sorts of criminal activities to raise funds for their war effort. However, in order to misrepresent the brutal occupation of FATA by these foreign militants as some sort of a voluntary reaction of angry Pakistani tribesmen against the American invasion of Afghanistan, the Pakistani authorities have prohibited all independent media outlets from entering FATA . The only access that journalists get into FATA is through guided military tours, where they are shown only what the military wants them to see.

Those journalists who dare to defy the military are dealt with severely. Hayatullah Khan was one of those journalists. Despite having received several threats from Pakistani intelligence officers, he did not cease to report from Waziristan and eventually, he was kidnapped by unknown persons, detained for six months and then murdered . Hayatullah’s brother insists that the murder was not carried out by the Taliban as they do not detain their targets, they kill them immediately. Hayatullah’s wife and friends also point the fingers towards the intelligence establishment. A few months later, his wife was also “silenced” in a bomb attack outside her house . No inquiry has been carried out into his death to this day.