FATA – the forever frontier 

By Zain Khan 

Born around the turn of the millennium, a generation in the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has known little besides war, operations and displacement. The 2018 merger of FATA with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) was presented as the end of that story. This essay argues otherwise. The merger was new wine poured into an old bottle: a genuine constitutional reform placed inside an administrative and strategic vessel that the state never chose to break. As the biblical proverb warns, the old vessel could not hold it.

The vessel was imperial by design. The British governed the tribal belt through the Frontier Crimes Regulation of 1901, which punished whole families and tribes for an individual’s offence and denied those convicted by a jarga any appeal in court. The historian Benjamin Hopkins calls this “frontier governmentality”: peoples were kept outside the state’s courts, made economically dependent while denied access to its economy, and governed through invented “customs” that gave the illusion of self-rule. Pakistan did not dismantle this order; it inherited it. Under Article 247, FATA lay beyond the superior courts and Parliament, administered by the Governor as the President’s agent through Political Agents. Ordinary residents gained the vote only in 1997, when the right ceased to belong to malaks alone, and political parties could operate lawfully only from 2011. For most of a century, the tribal citizen was shut out of the state politically, legally and economically, by imperial rulers first and their successors after.

That exclusion made the region useful. During the Soviet war in Afghanistan, FATA was used as a launching pad for the jihad, funded by American and Saudi money, while General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime treated the tribal areas as a route to “strategic depth”. A war economy of guns and opium took root, and the authority of tribal elders gave way to men with weapons. After 2001 the pattern repeated. Militant networks regrouped in FATA, and the state alternated offensives with deals struck from weakness: the Shakai agreement of 2004 and the Waziristan Accord of 2006 both collapsed, and in December 2007 the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan emerged. At every stage, decisions about the region served external strategy, and its people bore the cost.

The policy response to militancy compounded the injustice. Rather than extending courts, policing and services, the state relied on mass evacuation. Operations in Bajaur, South Waziristan and North Waziristan uprooted hundreds of thousands at a time; by 2014 almost five million people from KP and FATA had been registered as displaced since 2008. Overhead, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism had counted 385 US drone strikes by mid-2014, killing an estimated 416 to 957 civilians. On the ground, the displaced were renamed “temporarily dislocated persons” and processed through checkpoints, screening and identity databases, with aid often refused over registration errors. Policy treated tribal citizens as suspects to be filtered, not as rights-holders to be protected.

The 25th Amendment of May 2018 was meant to end this. It repealed Article 247, abolished the FCR and merged the seven agencies into KP, and in July 2019 the merged districts elected 16 members to the provincial assembly for the first time. The reform was right. Its implementation, however, has been a story of broken commitments. The Sartaj Aziz committee had pledged 3% of the federal divisible pool and Rs100 billion a year for ten years. By early 2025, KP said only Rs132 billion of that development money had arrived, and a provincial working paper later put the shortfall at about Rs540 billion. KP’s share of the National Finance Commission award remains 14.63%, unrevised for the 5.7 million people and roughly 22,000 square kilometres the merger added, even though the province argues it should be 19.64%. The federal finance ministry says it has transferred Rs704 billion since 2019. Yet whatever the accounting, Islamabad enlarged the province without redrawing the federation’s purse, and the merged districts were integrated on paper but not in the budget.

The consequences are measurable. When Pakistan launched its first Multidimensional Poverty Index in 2016, about 73% of FATA’s population was classed as poor, against nearly 39% nationally. The FATA Secretariat’s own 2013-14 household survey recorded literacy of 33.3%, and just 12.7% among women. These are the conditions in which a generation came of age: a state present as soldiers and checkpoints, absent as schools, clinics and jobs. Even trade, the one lifeline the border offered, is held hostage to security policy. When Torkham was closed in late 2025, the local labour union said more than 1,500 registered labourers lost their only income, and shopkeepers in Landi Kotal reported sales falling from over Rs30, 000 a day to a few thousand.

What the people of these districts want is not obscure; they have said it repeatedly. In August 2025, elders from Bajaur and Mohmand rejected military operations and forced displacement and called for an empowered jarga of federal, provincial and tribal representatives to pursue a lasting end to terrorism. In October 2025, a Grand Aman Jarga in Peshawar demanded dialogue over new operations, consultation with tribal representatives before any federal decision on the merged districts, and release of the funds owed to them. When KP’s Mines and Minerals Bill 2025 was proposed, Mohmand elders objected that local communities were shut out of site management, jobs, profit-sharing and policy-making, and accused both the federal and provincial governments of trying to take control of tribal resources. The demands are consistent: peace without displacement, a voice in decisions, and a fair share of what the land produces.

Policy has moved in the opposite direction. The TTP’s ceasefire collapsed in November 2022, and by 2025 violence had reached a decade high, with CRSS recording 2,331 deaths in KP alone. The state returned to its familiar tools. In August 2025, residents of 26 areas of Bajaur were ordered to evacuate. From December 2025, more than 70,000 people left Tirah valley, while federal ministers dismissed the exodus as seasonal migration. In June 2025, a federal committee began exploring the revival of the jarga system in the merged districts; the KP government called it a constitutional violation, even as its convenor denied any plan to reverse the merger. Then, on 11 October 2026, the President imposed governor’s rule in KP and an emergency in 12 districts, including all eight merged tribal districts, removing the elected provincial government. Before 2018, the tribal areas were administered through the Governor. Eight years after the merger, they are again.

This is a failure of policy, not of circumstance. Collective punishment has left the statute book, but its logic survives in evacuation orders and area-wide emergencies. Decisions on operations, funds and resources are still taken in Islamabad, and the elected tier is the first to be suspended. The masters have changed titles, from Political Agent to corps commander to Governor, but the vessel has not. Breaking the bottle would require four policy shifts: civilian and elected control over security decisions in the merged districts; an NFC award that counts their population, poverty and area, with the pledged development funds released in full; a legal bar on forced displacement without consultation and compensation; and a guaranteed local share in the ownership and revenue of mineral and border economies. Until then, the people of the former FATA will keep paying for the spill. For the generation born into this frontier, peace has never been a memory; it remains a promise still waiting to be kept.

The writer is an MPhils scholar in history from Peshawar University