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Politics : Idea Of The Day -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IQBAL LATIF who wrote (45621)	3/1/2004 2:33:36 AM
From: IQBAL LATIF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50167

Time to settle Tribal Areas According to reports, the Pakistani military operation in South Waziristan has evoked an extremely angry response from the people of the region because such areas are out of the writ of the state. Indeed, the opposition in Pakistan has accused the army of “attacking its own people”. The clergy is up in arms and, judging from the statements of the religious leaders, the MMA could be thinking of building some kind of mass protest on the basis of it. Yet some important questions raised by the military operation have gone unanswered. And the people of South Waziristan cannot answer these questions. The first question is: who were the people killed or arrested during the operation? The answer is that it is no longer possible for the tribals to distinguish between a local Pashtun, an Afghan-refugee Pashtun, and the terrorists of Osama bin Laden and Mulla Umar. The official claim that foreigners had been caught together with the local tribals was rebutted by local reports claiming that those captured were all local Pashtuns. No one had the answer to the Kazakhstan passports recovered among the papers found in strongholds stormed by the troops. One should remember that during his last visit to China, President Pervez Musharraf had received a list of Uighur-Kazakh terrorists wanted by China. The Sinkiang separatist campaign has its base in neighbouring Kazakhstan. More than half of Pakistan (almost all of Balochistan, the Tribal and Northern Areas) is not under any municipal law. The economy here is not legally linked to that of the rest of the country. Instead, on the western border all the tribes draw their livelihood from the porous border of Afghanistan, smuggling in cars and electronic goods and then spreading them across the ‘bara markets’ of urban Pakistan. Urban crime in Pakistan is also linked to the tribal badlands because the writ of the state doesn’t run there. In Balochistan, for instance, our gas pipelines are regularly blown up, emphasising the national challenge of bringing normal life to this vast area. We cannot keep this territory as a tribal museum forever. We have to bring education and development to the area, prevent local jirgas from blocking girls from education, and give the common man a legal stake in Pakistan instead of loyalty to terrorists who look like religious saviours to them. Our dream of a good future - especially in terms of the gas pipelines from Iran and Turkmenistan - is also tied up with this territory. Short-term necessity has compelled the state to venture into these areas. But this could also be a great opportunity to devise a longer-term strategy to coax these areas into the national life of the country. * dailytimes.com.pk