The rugged borderlands of northwestern Pakistan have long had a reputation for lawlessness and militancy, labeled by President Barack Obama as “the most dangerous place in the world.”
The Pakistani government, facing global scrutiny over the presence of groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, moved in 2018 to overhaul the semiautonomous region’s outdated governance. It merged what had been known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas into the country’s mainstream political and legal framework, vowing economic progress and a reduction in violence.
Today, the effort is seen by many in the region as a failure.
A renewed wave of terrorism, especially after the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan in 2021, has undone much of the progress toward stability. Attacks have risen sharply in Pakistan, with more than 1,000 deaths across the country last year, up from 250 in 2019, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, an international think tank. The group ranks Pakistan as one of the countries most affected by terrorism, second only to Burkina Faso in Africa.
The region’s troubles can be traced back to harsh colonial-era laws that were in force for more than a century and were meant to control the population, not serve it. The tribal areas’ ambiguous legal status and proximity to Afghanistan also made them a geopolitical pawn.
The merger of the underdeveloped region into a neighboring province has not resolved deep-rooted issues, experts say. The deteriorating law and order there is yet another major challenge for a nation of 250 million people that is grappling with economic instability and political turmoil.
Tribal elders and Islamist parties are now going so far as to advocate for the merger to be reversed. That is also a primary goal of one of the biggest sources of insecurity in the region: the Pakistani Taliban, who have waged a relentless assault on security forces in a campaign aimed at overthrowing the government and establishing an Islamic caliphate.
Pakistan’s leaders “promised development, peace, jobs and a fair justice system — everything we have been denied for decades,” said Noor Islam Safi, an activist from Mohmand, one of seven districts of the British-era tribal areas.
“The promises were empty,” he said during a protest in Mohmand that he led in mid-January. “All we’ve been given is neglect, rising violence and a growing sense of hopelessness.”
The former tribal region, which covers about 10,000 square miles — less than 5 percent of Pakistan’s landmass — and is home to more than five million people, has long been a stark emblem of terrorism, repression and neglect.
In 1901, the British imposed the harsh frontier laws to suppress resistance and buffer against Russian expansion. Pakistan inherited these regulations at its birth in 1947.
The region’s people were denied basic rights and excluded from national governance; they were not given the right to vote in Pakistani elections until 1997. Residents lived under the constant threat of arbitrary arrest and the absence of fair trials. Collective punishment was common. Entire communities suffered for the actions of one individual, facing imprisonment, fines, property destruction and exile.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 turned the region into a staging ground for Islamic fighters backed by the United States, Arab nations and Pakistan who were battling Moscow’s forces.
“This border region has long served as a geopolitical chessboard, where the ambitions of colonial and post-colonial powers have sought to influence Afghanistan and reshape global geopolitics at the expense of local communities,” said Sartaj Khan, a researcher in Karachi, Pakistan, with extensive expertise in the country’s northwest.
After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the region descended into lawlessness, becoming a hub for fugitives, criminal networks, smugglers of arms and drugs, and kidnappers demanding ransom.
The region became a militant stronghold after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, as U.S. military operations in Afghanistan pushed Taliban and Qaeda militants into the tribal areas.
Groups like Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, also known as the T.T.P. or Pakistani Taliban, moved to establish control. Such groups offered rudimentary governance while intimidating and killing tribal elders who resisted their rule.
Over time, the T.T.P. expanded its terrorist network beyond the borderlands, carrying out attacks across Pakistan, including in major cities like Karachi, and even internationally, notably in New York, with the attempted Times Square bombing in 2010.
After a vast operation in the tribal areas, the military declared victory over the T.T.P. in 2018. That year, Pakistan’s Parliament abolished the colonial-era laws and merged the region with the adjacent province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
But gaps in the integration process, analysts and political leaders say, left the region vulnerable when the Taliban returned to power. The Taliban’s resurgence gave the T.T.P. sanctuaries across the border in Afghanistan and access to advanced, American-made weapons that had been seized after the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
This allowed the Pakistani Taliban to escalate attacks in the former tribal areas. Since mid-2021, a majority of the surging terrorist attacks in Pakistan have occurred in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with a significant concentration in the seven former tribal districts, most notably North Waziristan and South Waziristan.
The T.T.P. killed 16 Pakistani soldiers in South Waziristan in December, and Pakistan responded with an airstrike inside Afghanistan, heightening tensions with Taliban rulers in Kabul.
In Kurram district, 50 miles southeast of Kabul, sectarian violence exacerbated by land disputes led to more than 230 deaths last year. Road closures by warring tribes have kept residents trapped in a cycle of violence.
Farther north along the Afghan border, in Bajaur district, 34 attacks were recorded in 2024, primarily carried out by the Islamic State Khorasan, or ISIS-K, the local branch of the Islamic State, which poses global security risks.
In other districts, the T.T.P. and local allied groups exert control, extorting money from traders.
The new legal frameworks in the former tribal areas remain largely unenforced because of inadequate administrative capacity and insufficient numbers of formal police officers. While the region was promised $563 million in annual development funding, Pakistan’s economic struggles have caused shortfalls. Many essential services are still underdeveloped or dysfunctional.
“An abrupt merger, rather than a gradual and thorough process, failed to replace a governance system that had operated for over a century,” said Naveed Ahmad Shinwari, a development expert with extensive experience in the region.
While police personnel have been recruited and stations established, the traditional semiformal police, composed of illiterate individuals representing their tribes, have struggled to transition into a formal structure, making them vulnerable to militant attacks. Courts exist in some places, but officials in many areas say that security concerns have prevented them from building a judicial infrastructure, forcing residents to travel long distances for justice.
As part of the Trump administration’s gutting of global aid, major initiatives in former tribal areas, including land settlement regulation and infrastructure improvements, have been disrupted.
The region’s merger initially garnered widespread support among residents eager for equal citizenship, but significant resistance has emerged to the changes that followed. Replacing outdated tribal policing and jirgas, or councils of tribal elders, has prompted deep concerns about the impact on a centuries-old way of life.
“Our jirgas used to resolve cases in months, sometimes days, but Pakistan’s overburdened judiciary takes years,” said Shiraz Ahmed, a resident of a remote village who traveled 60 miles for a land dispute hearing.
While some groups in the former tribal areas are calling for the merger to be reversed, analysts said that doing so could essentially hand the region over to militant groups.
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