Introduction
The relationship of tribes and the state, at least in the context of Pakistan, has remained harmonious for the most part until the Afghan War began. For the Pakistani statesmen, the recent challenge has been how to go about assimilation or integration of tribal areas in the settled territory without affecting the local tribal culture. This is a classical conflict between the state and the tribe, but this represents a more complicated relationship between the Pakistan state and the borderlands because of their geopolitical situation as a periphery and proximity to the Afghan war zone.
Has the Pakistani state pursued a well-designed, elaborate and consistent policy of bringing about social change through modernisation processes in the Northwestern borderland or has it relied on the colonial framework of âseparationâ and indirect control? This is a critical question that I wish to posit to carry out historical inquiry rather than to level a political critique of the Pakistani state for not doing enough about extending its writ or sovereignty into its frontier regions. Pakistanâs dilemma on its Northwestern borderland cannot be explained or understood without an extensive look at the colonial legacy and the great geopolitical transformations that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century in and around Afghanistan and the vast Central Asia beyond it. The second most important factor is a long cycle of forty-year war in Afghanistan that began with the Soviet intervention in 1980 to the present US engagement in Afghanistan for well over fifteen years. These two developments have had enduring effects on the geopolitics of the borderlands around Afghanistan, most remarkably the region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Pakistan couldnât escape the fallout of the Afghan wars on its border and national security because of its intensive involvement with great power interventions across the borders. The greatest effect has been on the Northwestern mountainous border region of Pakistan, also known as Tribal Areas and administered by the centre, which have seen frequent outbursts of militancy, conflict and violence for about a decade.1 A number of the militant groups that sprang from time to time over the past decade somehow have related themselves to the Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP) â a religio-political movement which is at best a mix of Wahhabi and Deobandi denominations of Islam. The TTP has ideological similarities with the Afghan Taliban and shares their goal of establishing an Islamic state, enforcing Islamic law and pursuing jihad. This carefully crafted slogan has also been the centrepiece of global radical Islam in the modern time.2 One of the threads in my essay also explains the impact of this slogan and the spread of global radical Islam, but in the context of the Northwestern borderland of colonial India and Pakistan. I observe that the linkages between the borderland and the global radical Islam go back to the Afghan War (1980â88) and other conflicts in the region and the Middle East, which have continuously redefined and restructured this relationship. Conflicts among tribes, ethnic groups, state and empire builders and rival powerholders in Afghanistan have been common throughout modern history.3 However, the dynamics of internal conflicts and their interaction with the world powers and neighbouring states dramatically changed with the proxy Cold War conflict during the Soviet-Afghan war.4 Since then, the border regions of Pakistan have remained connected with the conflicts in Afghanistan, causing a spillover of social, security and ideological effects across the Durand Line.5 This has left a great impact on the old power relationships within the region and also with the state of Pakistan.6
Therefore, the main proposition of this essay is that the autonomy of the tribes, who have practiced their own customary law of governance for centuries and organised themselves in a hierarchical egalitarian social structure, has been affected by the interplay of power politics of three sets of actors â great powers, regional states and the local and transnational militant groups. These actors formed a complex web of relationships, often intersecting, conflicting and shifting over the past four decades. The conflicts in the recent past have affected the social and political society on the borderland as well as its relationship with the Pakistani state.
Theorising Tribe and State Relationship in the Borderlands
The Western model of nation state and state building that leaders and policy makers in the developing world uncritically pursue looks at the relationship of the tribe with the state as a conflictive relationship.7 This perspective suggests that while the modern notion of national sovereignty and territorial control would require assimilation of the tribe into the larger national community, the tribe and its chieftains would strive to maintain their autonomy, traditions and political arrangements. Apparently, the ethos and structural needs of the two to survive, and for the state to expand, come into conflict. The states integrate tribesmen as citizens through a process of development, modernisation, and by structuring appropriate political institutions. It is not so simple however. The issue is of deeper historical nature because the tribes in this part of the post-colonial world and elsewhere found themselves as subjects or âcitizensâ of new states and âin many cases against their choice or willâ.8 The end of empires and dynasties, regional or European has left the tribes bounded by one or another state. In the case of borderlands, the same tribes are distributed among Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is a remarkable change in the role of the tribes from being on the âhighway of conquestâ and playing a critical role in determining the fortunes of dynasties and empires to having been reduced to a periphery.
While prior to the establishment and expansion of the British Indian Empire in the Northwest, the âtribe and the state formed a single systemâ,9 in the post-British era, the state acquiring territorial, centralised and sovereign character took the shape and features of European nation-state model. This left the tribes in the borderlands somewhat autonomous, but at the other hand on the margins of the state, and more as a problem of security and social order.
What I have argued in this essay is that colonial rulers and the Pakistan state have approached the tribal borderlands through the prism of security and social order of the areas beyond the tribal domain. Integration and assimilation of the tribes into the mainstream were never a policy; quite the opposite â separation and isolation were the policy. This policy has been rationalised on the ground of unique ecology of the region, character of the Pashtun tribes and the historical circumstances of Pakistanâs birth, which recognised autonomy of the tribes. The policy effectively created two-political systems â one for the nation, and the other for the tribes.
This brings us to the need for understanding the character of the Pashtun tribes and the issue of the tribal periphery. Unlike tribes in the Middle East that have played a central role in making the post-Ottoman sates, the Pashtun tribes in the borderlands are marginal to the state because of their mixed character of being partly pastoral, partly settled/segmented and partly decent groups interspersed in urban populations.10 They have transformed themselves as farmers and traders, but also owing to the imperial and Pakistani policies of extending education and services, they have become soldiers, bureaucrats, businessmen and politicians. In a strict sense, however, this segment of the tribes is not strictly tribal any longer, rather settled and urbanised by retaining relationships and identity as tribal descendants. In new age of democratic politics, this is the class that has assumed the role of intellectual leadership for the borderlands.
There are two major streams of thought on interaction between the tribe and the state and the outcome of this interaction that rests on two different readings of empirical reality. The first is somewhat a static view of the borderlands as autonomous, spatially bounded and managed by an internal political order â leadership, institutions and norms â jealously guarding the boundaries of the tribal political system. Akbar S. Ahmed explains the relationship of the tribe and state as centre-periphery relationship and argues that attempts to enforce any change by the centre have been historically resisted from Mughal to colonial and post-independence times.11 This view places the state and the tribes in a dichotomous position on the assumptions that social, political order and interests of the two are divergent. Tapper who argues that the tribe and the state are two different âcultural categoriesâ shares this view.12 But the dilemma of the tribes is that they are not a territorial unit but a part of large geography of the modern nation state. It is this new and broader ecology that as a matter of principle brings them under the authority of the state. The question however is, how is this authority exercised and what consequences does it create for the tribes and the state? The answer to this question lies in the second view of the interaction between the two, which argues that the tribe is inferior, unsustainable to the superior power of the state.13 The state has resources, power and policy tools that tribes cannot match. Therefore, being in a hostile sit...
