by Yasser Kureshi
 |
Pakistani society finds itself in a moment of deep self-reflection
today, as it confronts the horrors of the attack on the children at the Army
Public School in Peshawar. State and society are both trying to grapple with the reality that the people
responsible for this attack emerged from within Pakistani society. The
infrastructure for recruiting, training and mobilizing the militants behind
this attack lies within Pakistan’s borders. The public gaze has thus fallen
upon Pakistan’s tribal belt on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan where
Jihadi militant organizations, such as the Taliban, have deeply entrenched
themselves, driving out many of the traditional tribal leaders, and
establishing autonomous principalities. Understanding how Pakistan’s tribal
belt has become such a hotbed of sustained militant activity has now become a
subject of national and international concern.
Yet, when reviewing the prevalent literature on this
subject, for a chapter I co-authored with Haris
Gazdar and Asad
Sayeed, ‘The Rise of Jihadi Militancy in Pakistan's Tribal Areas’[1]
we found that, all too frequently the explanations for the growth of Jihadi
militancy in the tribal belt have been coloured by the ideological
predispositions of the analysts. Scholars on both the right and the left have,
for different reasons, sought to externalize the responsibility for the hostile
designs and violent tactics of these militants, searching for causal
explanations primarily in the American war in Afghanistan supported by the
Pakistani state, American drone strikes in Pakistan, and Pakistani military’s
direct encroachment upon these regions against the will of the tribesmen. While
these causes can partially explain the spread of Jihadi militancy in the tribal
belt, all of them characterize this development as a consequence of a tribal
population, clinging violently to traditions and resisting encapsulation, either
by western imperialism, or the oppressive Pakistani state. This understanding
of the current crisis in the tribal belt is shaped by the memory of previous
militant rebellions in the tribal belt, led by religious figures against the
British Empire. However, the political dynamics of the tribal belt have changed
significantly since then and the conditions that produced the colonial
rebellions of the 19th and 20th centuries are not replicated in the region
today. Our study, therefore, sought to correct this characterization of the
emergence of Jihadi militancy by examining the historical evolution of political
institutions and political economy of the tribal region.
In our study, we found that changes in the political economy
of the tribal region interacted with shifts in the region’s relationship with
the Pakistani state to provide both the unstable institutional vacuum for
clerical militants to fill and the resources and support these militants needed
to fill this vacuum. The region has been
ruled indirectly by the Pakistani state through officially supported tribal
leaders, maliks, and the oppressive colonial legal framework enshrined in the
Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR). This governance system was never properly
legitimized and produced a static institutional structure that fixed official
political power in the hands of maliks, hand-picked by the Pakistani state,
while new sources of rent were altering the balance of social power away from
these state representatives towards new aspiring elites. This governance
structure’s unpopularity and lack of legitimacy, coupled with the maliks’
diminishing monopoly over resources, created the ideal conditions for emerging
political entrepreneurs to challenge the leadership of the maliks. Clerics or
Mullahs, benefitting from both new sources of rent and the region’s shift to
Deobandi Islam as a source of legitimacy, were well-positioned to take on this
entrepreneurial role. Studying the paths taken by politically ambitious
Mullahs, we found that they were able to challenge the power of the official
Maliks by criticizing the corruption and dependency of the official Maliks, and
promising legitimate rule based on the moral authority of Islam, demonstrated
through the provision of more meaningful justice through arbitration and
dispute resolution.
At the same time, the Pakistani state’s relationship with
the people of the tribal belt also changed. The Pakistani security
establishment developed a close, national strategic and ideational alliance
with militant clerics and Islamist organizations proliferating in the border
region during, and after, the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. For the security
establishment, the war had demonstrated the utility of ideologically-driven
covert warfare to achieve geo-strategic objectives. Therefore, the Pakistani
state shifted its focus away from supporting the rule of the official tribal
Maliks (undermining their role as primary interlocutors between the state and
the people of the tribal belt), to providing arms and support to the militant
clerics. This shift in state policy enabled militant clerics to not just
confront, but displace, the tribal leadership in many parts of the region.
We, therefore, contend that today’s Jihadi militant clerics
of the tribal region have not emerged to protect the region from direct
encapsulation or foreign intervention. Instead, they are political
entrepreneurs seeking to create their own rule by displacing the traditional
tribal structure. Their ambitions are not limited purely to the tribal belt, as
they are linked to a network of militants and ideologues spread across the
Pakistani state, society and even beyond national borders. Understanding the
institutional causes of the development of this Jihadi militancy and its
implications is vital to determining what must be done to counter the threat to
Pakistan’s peace and stability. Ceding political and territorial space to
groups with expansionist agendas in the name of peace, will not work. Yet,
neither will a reliance on military action alone bring peace to the region as
the problem is, at its heart, a political one, and therefore a political
solution is necessary. Ultimately, shifting Pakistan’s tribal region gradually
towards a governance structure built upon rational-legal and democratic lines
will be the only way to create a stable and legitimate institutional
arrangement that can meet the needs of arbitration and dispute resolution and
distribute rents more equitably, without creating the space for violent
political entrepreneurs to assume control over the region and use it as a
springboard for further expansion. Learning lessons from this history of poorly
chosen institutional solutions to the challenge of governing the tribal belt,
is essential to drawing the roadmap towards
reducing the threat posed by these militants and establishing a fairer,
more equitable and more durable institutional relationship between the
Pakistani state and the peoples of the tribal belt.
[1] Haris
Gazdar, Yasser Kureshi and Asad Sayeed, The Rise of Jihadi Militancy in
Pakistan's Tribal Areas. in A. Sundar and N. Sundar eds. Civil Wars in South
Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development. New Delhi: Sage India. November 2014.
