 Good afternoon. Welcome to CSIS. My name is Arno de Borgera. I direct the Transnational Threats Project at CSIS. I guess my reason for being here today is that I've spent a lot of time in my journalistic career in South Asia, first covered the Chinese invasion of India in 1962, covered two of the three wars that India and Pakistan have fought. I've also covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and just before 9-11, I was in Afghanistan covering the Taliban regime. So think tanks, as you know, I'm sure better than I do, are by definition designed to open things up for deeper discussion about the critical issues of our time. And that's what we endeavour to do with what is arguably the most important foreign policy challenge facing President Obama and his national security team. It's part Pakistan, part Afghanistan, and of course, part FATTA. As Pakistan's Ambassador to the United States, Hussein Harkhani, himself put it to the House Armed Services Committee, Pakistan continues to be a major center for Islamist militancy, radical Islamists who came from all over the Muslim world to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, with powerful encouragement, of course, from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia throughout the 1980s. These same Islamists and their sons went on to become allies of Pakistan's military intelligence apparatus. Ambassador Harkhani added these Islamists were then used to fight Indian control over Kashmir, as well as to expand Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan. What we call extremists and what Pakistan intelligence sometimes regards as assets is part of the problem as the team assembled by CSIS takes a new and different look with granularity at the critical issue of FATTA, those seven tribal agencies under Pakistan's sovereignty, which Pakistan has always had a hard time exercising, and which the Mumbai terrorist massacre makes even more critical. Now that India has turned over the evidence that the Mumbai terrorists were Pakistanis trained in Pakistan, Islamabad says it will bring those responsible to justice. But for those of you who follow that part of the world more closely, you know that if things blew up again today, the National Security Advisor of Pakistan, Ambassador Durrani, was pushed out of office. Also, Pakistan rejects the latest allegation from the Indian government that it was Pakistan at the government level that did Mumbai and so on and so forth, but it seems to gain traction again as a crisis. Frequently overlooked by all sides is the impact of madrasas, the thousands of single-discipline Quranic schools that produce plenty of potential volunteers for extremist actions, including suicide missions. But we forget that the CIA and Saudi intelligence encouraged the notion of Jihad training to mobilize resistance against the Red Army in Afghanistan. And at the outset, madrasas were established as an ideological barrier against the spread of communism from Afghanistan into Pakistan. And secret Saudi Wahhabi clergy funds continue to keep the madrasa culture alive to this very day. The future of Afghanistan, the future of NATO, the future of failure of President Obama's foreign policy, or a stake in the acronym FATA. General David Petraeus told me last summer a fresh look at FATA was high on his list of priorities, hence the CSIS initiative. And I gave the new CENCOM command of the very first unedited, unbound copy without, of course, the charts and graphs and maps over a month ago. This effort of ours was encouraged and funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation. The U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan received 70 percent of their supplies, including food and 40 percent of their fuel, overland from the Port of Karachi, a thousand-kilometer journey through the Khyber Pass, now the world's most vulnerable lifeline. Subject, as you know, to frequent hit-and-run attacks by pro-Taliban raiders. There is little doubt in the intelligence community that al-Qaeda is plotting the next 9-11 somewhere in FATA. Turkey, Germany, and the U.K., just to name three countries, have tracked local national terrorist suspects to FATA and back presumably for training. This, of course, is not to say that Pakistan hasn't been a victim of terrorism. In fact, it has been one of its principal victims in the world and taken many casualties fighting it. Heading our CSIS task force on FATA and the principal author of the report that you have today is Shuzha Nawaz, a U.S.-based Pakistani scholar who recently published an international bestseller titled Cross-Swords Pakistan, Its Army and the Wars Within, which you can get through Amazon Oxford University Press. Shuzha is also a journalist who has reported for print and web and TV media and is much in demand as a speaker about Pakistan and the region. On U.S. and Pakistani broadcast media and, of course, at think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic. Shuzha also had 30 years of experience as an international civil servant at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and he was also a director at IAEA in Vienna. Next Monday he becomes, and this is an exclusive announcement, he becomes the first director of the South Asian Center at the Atlantic Council here in Washington. Also on this panel this afternoon is Aziz Hussein, Dr. Hussein, who was one of the five specialists who worked with Shuzha on this effort. He's vice president for preventive diplomacy at the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, acronym ICRD, here in Washington. Dr. Hussein currently heads ICRD's Pakistan-Madrasa project, which has trained more than 2,000 Madrasa leaders in a campaign to take these out of control, out of the control of extremist moolers, who teach, of course, as you know that the United States is on a crusade to destroy Islam and that 9-11 was applauded by the CIA and Mossad to provide the pretext to do just that. Dr. Hussein was the recipient of the 2006 Peacemakers in Action Award by the Tannenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in New York. As you will see in your report pages 36 through 41, deal with what can be done near-term, which means the next year or two, and medium-term, or three to five years, by the government of Pakistan, the Pakistan military, the US military, Sencom, and the government of Afghanistan. The costs of failure are simply put a victory for transnational terrorism and mission impossible in Afghanistan. As the report concludes, a nuclear Pakistan is a base for international terrorism as a prospect that the world cannot afford. But there are no quick solutions. Without the short-term action recommendations, the mid-term ones, let alone the long-term ones, become pie in the sky. So now I turn it over to Shusha. Thank you. Thank you, Arnaud. I'm honored to present a very brief look at this fairly detailed report, which, as Arnaud has explained to you, was a joint effort of a number of persons who contributed to it over a very short period. Just to give you an idea, we began the project in July this year, last year. And with a lot of intensive meetings here, often meetings with people in different parts of the world, communicating by audio conference. We managed to get the project going, produce some initial hypotheses and recommendations, and then with support from the CSIS, managed to go into the field and try and test some of those ideas by talking to key people in government as well as others in FATA. So this is a joint effort, although it carries my name as the principal author, I should acknowledge the contributions of the other participants. And although you have the monograph with you just briefly, they included Mariam Abu Zahab, who is a scholar who has spent 35 years as an expert on FATA. She even speaks some Pashto, and she spends all her free time when she's not teaching at Sciences Po or any other place in Paris. She gets on the plane, leaves all her western clothes behind, and dresses in the local garb, gets on the plane and arrives there. Indeed, she spent a few months there recently. Aziz Hussain has already been introduced. He was an extremely valuable resource because here is another person who's been in the field working within Afghanistan as well as in FATA and in Madrasas in Karachi, among other places, where he's trying to roll this huge rock up the hill, the rock of militancy. And then Aisha Jalal, who many of you probably know from her previous writings. She's a brilliant historian now at Tufts University, and her most recent book is Partisans of Allah, which is the story of Jihad. And Aisha participated in this venture as an expert in the sense that she kept us on the straight and narrow. She would listen in on our discussions and ask all the tough questions, and then she would comment on the drafts. And then Kim Martin, who is from Barnard College, who's done a lot of work on conflict resolution and post-conflict situations, and who has recently developed an interest in FATA, and so immediately immersed herself in such deep research that we felt that she was an extremely valuable member of the team. And then the youngest member of the team, a brilliant PhD candidate from Seis Johns Hopkins University, Josh White, unfortunately he couldn't be here either today. I would have wanted him to come and present some of his ideas, but a lot of his research and thinking is reflected in the report. And I want to thank all these team members for their efforts because the report is, as I said, a joint effort. Just very briefly, it was interesting for me to concentrate on this, not just as a Pakistani, but as somebody who's been following developments in FATA for the last few years with a lot of dismay and unhappiness at what was happening, because to me it appeared that history appeared to be repeating itself and that what successive governments, going back 100 plus years, have been doing in FATA, we risk repeating unless we look to a new way of involving the people of FATA and making them the primary source of information and guidance before we go in with our avowed mission of developing them and moving them away from whatever path we think that they are taking. I discovered, for instance, just in the last few weeks that my own grandfather, who had served in the British Indian Army, had fought in two Vaziristan campaigns. He fought in 1901 and in 1908 and he was wounded in 1908. He ended up then fighting in a place called Mesopotamia, which many of us now know as Iraq, and he was wounded in Iraq too. And then for his sins, I guess he was sent to Belgium and he fought there. So there's a kind of a family connection because his son, my uncle, then fought in 1937. Again, a Vaziristan campaign and was mentioned in dispatches. So these wars and these punitive expeditions are going to carry on unless we want to change the course of history and this is why we felt it was important to look at FATA and to come up with what we thought were practicable solutions, the things that could be done that weren't 60,000 feet, that were at ground level, that with the right amount of political will that some things could get started. As Arno said, our recommendations, which are short term, could only work and lay the basis for the medium term recommendations. But most important, we believe that unless you restore security to the region and unless you provide that security from inside the region rather than from fortresses and from camps that are kept apart from the people of FATA that you are not going to be able to gain that traction and get them involved and get the ownership that you require for any project to work in FATA. As we mentioned in the report and I will go through this later in my introduction, there are examples of things that work. Even the much maligned U.S. aid effort has some very bright spots in it. The Office of Transition Initiatives has tested certain techniques for getting things done. The NAS, which is the Narcotics Assistance Section of the U.S. Embassy has long experience in the area and one of their lessons has also been that if you work with the people and they help you identify what their needs are then you can give them the ownership and they'll help you succeed. So why is FATA so critical now? As Arno was saying in his introduction, it's critical because it's not simply a sliver of land on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan but it's an issue that confronts the world and it's an issue that confronts Afghanistan and Pakistan together. So you cannot look at it solely in terms of a Pakistani perspective and then cross the border and take an Afghan perspective because that border is porous and has always been. We found an old map that we put in the report. We've sort of dolled it up a little bit so that it's more readable and even though that map is incomplete in some ways because some of the tribes that we now know exist in each of the agencies that are not mentioned there like the Salar Zayi of Bajor that map gives you an idea of just how discreet and self-contained these tribal and sub-tribal units are and that's a very important element of dealing with FATA that you cannot find a silver bullet, you can't find a single solution that will allow you to find an answer to all the problems that we face in that region or emanating from that region. We're also looking at FATA because the United States is concerned that the sort of petri dish for global terrorism resides in that area or on the outskirts of that area and it's been very hard to pinpoint exactly where the Al Qaeda people and Osama bin Laden are actually residing but in all probability they find the border equally porous and they probably are moving at will and if you were to ask me I would think that it's probably in the northern reaches that you might find them but to go back to the basic point that we discovered in looking at past experience and what's happening now in FATA and that point I cannot stress and repeat enough which is that you have to go to the people find out what their needs are and then try and get them involved in meeting those needs that highfalutin programs and projects that are conceived in distant Washington or the capitals of Europe or in Tokyo will not do the trick you really have to get them involved. Just a very brief history, many of you I know from the list that I've seen already expert in the region but one of the problems that has occurred in creating the conflict in FATA is that it has always historically been treated as a buffer zone so it didn't have an entity of its own. The British began this policy and they insisted that there be a demarcation of the boundary and so Sir Mortimer Durand went ahead and drew lines on the map and when you see the map that we have of the ancient tribal boundaries you'll find that he ended up dissecting some of the major tribal groups for instance the Mormons who are a very major tribal group in Pakistan are divided by the Durand line between Afghanistan and Pakistan and as a result they have never accepted the boundary and Afghanistan did not actually allow the physical demarcation of that segment of the boundary. The other thing was that FATA when it was inherited by Pakistan in 1947 instead of amalgamating it or over time amalgamating it into the rest of Pakistan it became a separate entity it had its own legal system which was the frontier crimes regulations which go back to the beginning of the 20th century. As a result there was no sense of belonging and no sense of participation in the polity of Pakistan by the people that lived in FATA. It's amazing that in spite of that the people of FATA continued to interact with Pakistan as if it was their own country and in fact as a very brief mention of some recruiting statistics into the Pakistan Army show there's been an actual increase in the number of people who are being recruited for both soldiers and officer ranks in FATA and who are then retiring and going back to the FATA. The other big problem was that from the get go the political participation of people of FATA was taken away from them. They could only look after their own affairs inside FATA. The political parties act of Pakistan did not apply so as a result when you go there you see the flags of various Pakistani political parties flying but none of their officials, none of their leaders are allowed to go to FATA and campaign or to run candidates on their tickets. So over time when following General Zahal Haq's regime when the Mullah came to the forefront you basically had an open space which the Mullah then occupied and he had a pulpit and that became his political base and no wonder that today religion is such an important part of the polity of FATA. So this is another issue that obviously needs to be tackled. Another point that's worth remembering is that there was at some point an attempt made to settle Shia groups in what's now the Quraam agency and so you have in a small part of FATA a very active proxy war that has been going on for many years and in this the participation of both the Iranian and Saudi backers has often been mentioned and what makes it really dangerous now is that the extreme right-wing Punjabi militant groups some of whom are now being implicated in the Mumbai attacks have actually moved into that area and are providing muscle for the rest of the Sunni groups there against the Shia and so you've had an exodus of the Shia into Afghanistan for instance. This is an extremely dangerous move because the people that have come are those that at one time were obviously being trained for the Jihad in Kashmir and so they are extremely sophisticated in their training. They can teach people on how to make bombs and use advanced weapon systems. So against this background and in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan we thought that it would be important to lay out very briefly some of the perceptions and realities that are confronted when we look at FATA and it's worth talking about these because it's sometimes very difficult to separate perceptions from reality and quite often the perception ends up reinforcing reality and so therefore I'll just go through these because they give a summary of the views of the team. First, the U.S. went into Afghanistan without a comprehensive plan for winning the war beyond the immediate ouster of the Taliban and the evidence for this is the fairly rapid shift of the United States forces from Afghanistan to Iraq. There was at that time no evidence of a comprehensive socioeconomic development plan or what would be a definition of victory in Afghanistan. The United States also failed to see the proactive need to help Pakistan transform its own army and the frontier corps into an effective counter-insurgency force and this was done almost blindly by agreeing to a transfer of resources through the coalition support funds so that there was a bill and a reimbursement and there was almost no discussion at the beginning of what the objectives were, what the benchmarks would be and how would that be tested over time. And so as a result, the Pakistan army has been in a kind of reactive mode ever since. Another perception or reality is that Afghanistan did not show a willingness to address the grievances of the Taliban against the excesses of the Northern Alliance in the wake of the U.S. invasion. Now this has fed a very strong perception that persists to this day that somehow the U.S. move is an anti-Pakhtun move or an anti-Pakhtun move and therefore till Afghanistan internally resolves this matter, this problem is likely to persist. Another powerful reality is this. The United States cannot win the war in Afghanistan without the full and willing participation and support of Pakistan. Its army as well as its general population and unfortunately as time goes by the popular support in Pakistan for this war which was seen as America's war has been dwindling. Also the United States cannot win by aligning itself with any single individual or party in Pakistan. And this was evident in the reliance on President and General Parvez Musharraf who was all in all after 2001. Arnaud has already referred to another reality which is that some 80% of cargo and 40% of the fuel that is consumed in Afghanistan by the coalition is supplied through Pakistan in the shipments that come from Karachi and then go across the border in Chaman in Balochistan as well as in Turhan. The reality also is that Uzbekistan has expelled the United States and Russia has the ability to block flights over its territory so the alternatives are very insignificant. There are reports of a road that is now being constructed with help from the Indian Frontier Works Organization or the Border Works Organization and that road goes through Iran to Chabahar but then we face another immovable object which is Iran in terms of U.S. foreign policy. Another perception or reality call it what you will is that Pakistan, its army and the ISI have had a very ambivalent position regarding the Afghan Taliban and this was based on a very strong supposition that the United States would exit Afghanistan rapidly as it once did after the exit of the Soviets from Afghanistan and that this could also happen if they captured or killed some of the Taliban leadership and that the U.S. would declare victory and move on. And the other supposition was that Pakistan wanted some kind of a friendly or at least neutral government in Kabul even if it was the Taliban and because the Taliban are Paktun and because most of Fata is entirely all of Fata is Paktun it was seen as a win-win situation for Pakistan if there was another Paktun government in Kabul. On its part, Afghanistan has some perceptions that it that informs its actions and one of them is a fear that Pakistan wants to maintain control over Afghanistan as some kind of a client state. The fact that it is a landlocked economy makes it harder for Afghanistan to be independent of Pakistan in that regard. And another powerful and persistent perception within Pakistan which informs the situation in Fata is that rival India has chosen to develop both civil and military ties with Afghanistan and it is alleged that it even helps fuel some of the militancy in Pakistan. So many Pakistanis when you talk to people on the street still see some kind of a massive international conspiracy to encircle and weaken and destroy Pakistan and many of them repeatedly point to this famous map that Mr. Peter has produced about the new Middle East with bits of Pakistan floating off into other neighboring countries. Yet we have to recognize that neither capitulation nor confrontation by Pakistan with U.S. interests in Afghanistan and in Fata is the right approach. Rather, engagement and a joint effort to eliminate the militancies inside Afghanistan and Pakistan is the best approach. And how to go about it? Pakistan has committed the equivalent of six divisions to Fata and to Northwest Frontier province against the militancy. These are the six divisions that formed part of Pakistan's strike force against India if ever there was to be a conflict. And so the Pakistan Army is very nervous about this very vulnerable area where they've now removed the infantry from the Indian border and the infantry sitting on the Afghan border. But the reality is also that the Pakistan Army is predominantly as the share of population of the various provinces indicates 60% a Punjabi Army. And so there are only something like 14.6% Paktuns in the Pakistan Army. And so when they go into Fata and they go especially outside the built up areas where some people do speak Urdu they are totally an alien force and that's how they're also regarded by the people in the countryside. So it's a very difficult kind of situation. The reality also is that Pakistan is fighting a counterinsurgency and a militancy inside its own borders so it has to be very cognizant of the collateral damage particularly to civilians which will have a huge backlash in Fata but in the rest of the country. Another reality which has emerged over the last few years is that the traditional system of governance that was used in Fata that was inherited from the British involved a government representative a political agent who was supposed to know all the tribal leaders and who would selectively appoint mullics who would then receive largesse from the government and deal with them for keeping law and order within their areas but the sad thing of this system of government was that there was tribal responsibility for any wrongdoing so if I belonged to the Dawar tribe in North Waziristan and something happened in my area and I was the head mullic I would be called in and thrown into jail and my family would be thrown into jail and I would be told to go and produce the crooks and the tribe is responsible and all our privileges and all our payments would be stopped so this is a very crude colonial system that was inherited by Pakistan and maintained by it well over time with the change in demographics the porosity of the border the movement of the Pakhtun population from Fata to other parts of Pakistan particularly to Karachi and the Gulf you had an opening in the minds of people in Fata and so this old system no longer works what made it even less effective was that we had a number of successive governors of the Northwest Frontier province under General Musharraf who were ex-army people who even though they were Pakhtuns themselves decided that the old system of beating the Pakhtuns over their heads till they begged for forgiveness and then giving them money was the best way of ruling them and so when they went in after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and tried to help clear the border they ended up alienating the Maliks they ended up alienating the political administrators and when these power centers disappeared guess who was around to pick up the pieces and take charge it was the Mullah again I won't go into great detail about the role and the emergence of the Mullah because I mentioned it a few times and you will see in the report itself how over time there was a sociological transformation of tribal society and how the Mullah who used to be a peripheral actor came into the center of the tribal decision making so I'm going to skip over that we've also heard repeatedly from the many excellent other reports that have been done on Fatha and on Pakistan recently by think tanks in Washington of the disparity in the socioeconomic indicators so suffice it to say that when you have female literacy of 3% in Fatha and if the socioeconomic indicators in Pakistan are here province they're here and in Fatha they're over here there is a massive disequilibrium in opportunity for those people and why would they feel part of Pakistan and feel an ownership for Pakistan before I go into a very brief introduction of some of the key suggestions that we made I think at this point I would like to ask if you could talk a little bit about the work that he's done that he contributed to our effort on the madrasa reform because that's an issue that is quite critical to how we proceed on Fatha so Aziz can you all hear me I know after lunch there is a food coma happening here so I'll try to make it exciting madrasas are probably most of you all know are religious institutions they provide room and boarding for and food for students largely poor students in Pakistan and it's an eight year program it's called darshanizami curriculum emphasis is on religious teaching the first part of it is hives which is memorization of ground and after that it's about the prophet's life the philosophy of Islam and most of these madrasas are there are about there are about nobody knows how many but about 20 to 25,000 of these seminaries that are full time in Pakistan some of them are very big most like a university setup have up to 7 to 8,000 students that live there so it's a pretty big enterprise madrasas are also important because they create imams or clerics for Pakistani society and as you can imagine you can create an engineer or a doctor but when you have an imam who speaks to a few thousand people every week and advises a lot of people the reach and influence of the message of a cleric is huge so madrasas though might be small in compared to the numbers of public school system that have in fact more of an impact in a Pakistani society if you start to if you multiply the influence of each cleric who is getting out of these schools again I think should you already talk about perceptions and I think perceptions are real in their consequences because most of it is perception on both sides as well in America as well in West when madrasas especially religious leaders perceive that the United States is out there to destroy the identity of Islam and they are there to protect the identity of Islam of course you are fighting an intractable battle and it is intractable in such a acute way that unless these issues are resolved and some of the tones are not changed I think those perceptions will persist just to give you just to wake you up a little bit more I think especially when I'm talking to Tariqa Taliban commander in northwest frontier province especially in Fata area he says thank god you know you really shown your colors and you me Americans he thinks of me as an American he's gone through our workshop and he said we had such a hard time for the last 2-3 years recruiting people to fight the westerners and as soon as the predators strike in a madrasa in northwest frontier Fata area we have hundreds literally of recruits willing to fight so no simple solutions here to think that a force or military or even engagement can solve the problem I think there's multiple level of engagement and we have to think very hard so there is madrasas are quite influential in Pakistan in Fata area especially but there are those perceptions that somehow United States or west especially is after them after Islam or their identity exasperate the issue of engagement with madrasas and then Pakistani government being ally of United States then serves the similar role in building trust with madrasas Pakistani government is also out there to destroy who we are and then on top of that then policy makers in Pakistan as well and the government when the reports come to United States has all to do with developing the country which is the government's job but very little to do with developing the religious part of it and madrasa and religious leaders feel that they are being sideline and isolated so all these perceptions kind of creates this sense of victim mentality sense of mentality that they are being oppressed from all these different sides and of course that creates much more isolation and they insulate themselves even further so level of exposure is very very little and conspiracy theories goes sky high in madrasa you hear things I've been training madrasas leaders and teachers for last 5 years about 2,500 been trained or program so many of them are asking us to do more of their training on pedagogy, teacher development and peace and tolerance which is surprising to most of the western folks because it's perceived as they are so resistant to change or to teach contemporary courses especially English, math and sciences but when you engage them with a sense of respect and create an equilibrium with integrity there is a way to address some of these conflicts and I think one of the major issues with religious leaders in Pakistan especially madrasas is that they constantly talk about a very autocratic government it's oppressive and it's unjust and that it oppresses its people it does not provide the development opportunities the poverty is going up so these are the major pieces which all of us probably would agree with and this is the religious line so I think not using madrasas or religious leaders for development activities when they are embedded within the community becomes even more it looks like a total conspiracy theory because all of our development it goes to Pakistan Pakistan says don't give it to madrasa the heightened sense of fear and goes up even more I do think that there's got to be a way to find because in fatta area where the development is acutely needed madrasas already have an infrastructure poor but there is an infrastructure each madrasa have some sort of a clinic you can offer a lot to the communities there and since they talk about justice and injustices there could be courses and I've talked to fatta madrasas many times where they would take a course on justice how to create even on a secular sense how to create small clinics to provide people their rights legal rights and I think so these are all very healthy activities that one can involve religious leaders and madrasas especially because those are those will only enhance the capacity of the government to provide the services to the community in fatta which is so needed there's lots of recommendations here and I'll go through it very very quickly you can go through the recommendations but I think my line of argument is very similar to shuja's which is thoughtful, careful engagement of religious leaders and religious institutions and western organizations in a safe way and also Pakistani government especially I think would result in a positive social change thank you Aziz Aziz detailed suggestions are in the report and I'll be mentioning some of them just two points before I get to our major recommendations one that there's some kind of a notion, a quaint notion that the tribal areas and therefore fatta are different and that the people are different and their needs are different when you actually sit down and talk with them you discover that they are no different from people in the United States or in the rest of Pakistan or in Iraq or in Afghanistan the basic needs that they talk about and this emerged in a conversation I had with 23 tribal maliks representing the wazir and the dawer tribes in north waziristan are irrigation they want help with their systems they want basic education so their kids can go and compete in the world outside they want primary healthcare and they want access to hospitals in the area so that they don't have to cart their sick long distances into the settled area where they will only do when the people are on their deathbed and so there is a very bad association between going to a hospital because you never recover you die and education which is critical for them they feel that they want their girls educated and they want full time teachers rather than ghost teachers in the area so that's something to keep in mind the other point worth mentioning is we mentioned the inability of the pakistan army to fight a counterinsurgency this has been a very difficult transition for an army that was poised always to deal with india in a conventional war for an army that introduced mountain warfare in ratu at 16,000 feet but only because that could be used in kashmir but that over time in fact stopped teaching a separate course called frontier warfare which the british introduced which was all based on waziristan and that area and so they are now gradually coming back to that and there is a kind of relearning of the process but the doctrinal shifts haven't taken place in the army it's still an army that lacks the tools to do the job they don't have helicopters and you need mobility in the united states promise them 27 helicopters not all have been delivered they are still being refurbished and when you look at that vast area an ark going from south waziristan all the way up to dir and bajor how can you deal with a very mobile militant force which is using pickup trucks to move in and out and attack isolated posts and disappear so there is a serious issue there that needs to be addressed in this background we came up with the proposals of what can be done and i'm not going to go through the entire list but i just want to highlight a few so for the government of pakistan we've suggested that it must openly discuss and agree in parliament on the status of fapa this is something that has been pushed under the carpet it needs to discuss its relationship with the nwfp government and it needs to discuss the relationship between fapa and nwfp and the central government you have to involve the local people in this situation so that you don't have a dual border situation where you have one border with afghanistan and another border with fapa so if you integrate fapa into pakistan proper you're likely to get the same kind of reaction and participation from the people of fapa that you got from the nwfp when it joined pakistan in 1947 so an end to treatment of fapa as a buffer zone that's the basic point amend or then displace and replace the frontier crimes regulation so that you can provide justice which is the point that aziz was making everybody wants justice immediately and the taliban provide rapid justice so how do you displace them you have to replace the fcr also extend the political parties act to fata so that they feel that they belong to pakistan and they participate in the politics of pakistan for the pakistan military we have suggested strengthening the ability in the role of the frontier corps to provide security to the local population from but from within the population to put an end to the idea of sitting in camps and you find this tremendous disparity you go there and there's load shedding so there's no electricity but the military camp is all lit up because they have generators and the rest of the population doesn't have electricity it creates tensions and conflict between the military and the locals we've suggested something very specific which is that because of the hiring of people from fata and from the northwest frontier province over the years into the military you have a pool of retired fc and pakistan army people living in fata and if you were to only rehire them and make them part of the development effort and security efforts locally it would be a much less expensive way than having to use large bodies of trained armor and artillery and so on and there would be people living within the community so they would be much more effective we've also suggested an intensification of training and counterinsurgency and I was very pleased in august when I went I got a detailed briefing from general pasha who is now the head of the ISI who was then head of military operations about an actual program that the pakistan army now has for inducting troops into this fight so that they go through an indoctrination and training ending up with a live fire exercise so that they know exactly what to expect this is what the british used to do and that stopped happening over time we've also suggested establishing closer cooperation with the afghan forces and the coalition forces across the dirand line and we're pleased to report that the latest news indicates that the defunct tripartite commission has now actually been revived in his meeting regularly alternating between karbaland and rabbalpindi and general kiani himself has made that a special effort on his part we've also suggested that the united states help train the pakistan army in producing civil affairs officers because there is no such training or ability within the pakistan army today they have a few people who deal with pr but i ran into one colonel who had been two years in fatah and i asked him in pashthu i said do you speak pashthu and he said no well that was basically the end of my pashthu but he didn't even have that so you need to have that capacity and be able to converse in their term we are suggesting a definition of an exit strategy for afghanistan what is it that will mean victory for whatever aims you want to set for afghanistan and to accelerate a very targeted economic development of pakistan as a whole because you need to win all of pakistan's support the nwfp and of course fatah the nwfp is critical because the stain of militancy will cross the border with fatah into the settled areas and that's now threatening the heartland we have also suggested that the sent com commander somehow convince his lawyers in washington to redefine the theater of war so that fatah becomes part of that theater which would allow the sent com to use the commander's emergency relief funds in conjunction with the pakistan army which appears to be willing to use these and get the cash directly into the hands of the people we have to recall that this is a cash economy that the projects that we now come up with in washington start leaking at a very rapid rate in washington then in islamabad and then in pashawar by the time you get to the ground there's very little money getting into the hands of the people so this way you're in there the people responsible give them the money go back review what they've done and then give them some more money that's the fastest way of getting them on your side in our view we also suggest rebuilding the trust because of this enormous trust deficit between the u.s. military and pakistan and that can only happen by bringing particularly younger and medium level officers together afghan and pakistan there was an attempt made to bring colonels from the pakistan army to the ndu to interact with the afghans in washington the first attempt failed miserably because for some reason one of the seven agencies that clears visas refused to give a visa to any of the pakistani colonels and so they couldn't come now there may be third country options available too but this needs to be done at a very rapid click and then for the government of afghanistan we are suggesting coordinating with pakistan and building infrastructure inside afghanistan and in fatah so that you have roads and that roads lead to open economies and create their own job opportunities for people we're also suggesting providing cash crop alternatives to opium and there are proposals afoot from people that know more about it than we do about buying opium even for medicinal purposes for pharmaceutical industry and we're suggesting as I mentioned earlier joint training programs between pakistan and afghan forces and one idea that emerged was that the U.S. is trying to rebuild the afghan air force and the pakistan air forces had a long experience in building air forces of other smaller countries in the region particularly in the gulf so that may be a good opportunity to get into that briefly on the madrasas it's not just a short term but a medium term effort as aziz was saying you need to set up and register training centers inside fatah so that they operate under civilian control that's quite critical you need to regulate the madrasas so that they're accredited and they're affiliated with the regular education boards in the rest of pakistan and you also need to introduce vocational training in the public schools because work opportunities in the gulf are drying up you now have about 4 million pakhtuns living in karachi sizable population in fact more than live in fatah and the ability of karachi to absorb more emigrants from fatah is very limited so you need to focus on preparing them using whatever is on the ground including the madrasas transforming the madrasas into a force for the good rather than one that you view with suspicion I'm going to stop here and I'm sorry I took so long we'll have time for questions and hopefully Aziz and I and Arna will be able to answer your questions I saw a lady with her hand up yes ma'am I think the microphone is right next to you could you identify yourself yes my name is Narju Salli and I was born and grew up in Pakistan so I have an observation the word madrasa comes from the word daras which means lesson and madrasa really means school that's the literal translation and I think the implied meaning of madrasa being a religious school destroying that whole culture in Pakistan and I feel that madrasa was a word that we always used as a translation for school so why cannot the public school system be integrated once you have your training and everything set up in the madrasas that exist today which I want to call dini madrasas and not just madrasa so why would we not call all public schools that are probably urdu medium madrasas and they would have education not just religious education I think you are right madrasa in arabic madrasa means school so it does not automatically means a religious school dini madrasa means religious school so but to name public school as well madrasa just probably would not fly just because the society has grown out of it the nomenclature and the name itself has so much significance symbolic meanings behind it that many people would have problem going to madrasa that in fact is a public school which is public schools are run by government madrasas do not take any money from the government so I think I am not sure how one would do that surely is also the problem of the fact that the government cannot afford public schools as most of the money goes into the military hence the growth of the madrasas which are free absolutely I think this is a huge problem yes sir microphone right behind you thank you this is a terrific effort using social sciences sociopolitical and economic approaches to understanding this although it was not covered in the report to what degree is the acquisition and distribution and sources of weapons guns bombs and so forth a factor in this and I realize that's a different form of information but how much of a factor might that be surely everybody in that part of the world is born with a gun in its cradle that's correct and also as many of us have now seen because almost all foreign journalists make the obligatory stop in Dara Adam Khail where they can reproduce any weapon in the world it may not be as effective but it certainly looks like any weapon in the world so weapons are a part of FATA and this is also one of those rules where if you are treated as a buffer zone they are allowed to carry their weapons without any later hindrance whereas in the rest of Pakistan you need a license now in terms of the supply of weapons I guess that was where you were headed that unfortunately was not a topic that we covered and when I went to Swat and Malakand and saw some of the captured weapons as well as the chemicals it was quite evident that they were coming from all over the world I mean the chemicals that were being used to create bombs for instance had factory markings from Germany and so there is clearly an international market which is very effective and because the borders are porous and because you can get them through the Gulf and through other locations the supply of weapons is something that has been unabated another point that is worth remembering is that there were a lot of weapons left over after the Soviet war there were weapons that were left in caves that the Taliban were directed to by the ISI when they began their move and so a lot of those weapons are still in existence and in circulation some are pretty ancient but they still work and land mines are in plentiful supply and it doesn't cost a lot for the Taliban to get young kids to go and dig up these mines and then use them for IEDs and other devices Yes sir My name is Walter Anderson I'm from SAIS, I'm George Weiss dissertation advisor Can you speak a bit? I'm George Weiss dissertation advisor Dr. Tushuja, in your report you mentioned that the collapse of the Malik traditional authority has opened up the space for resistance and much of the resistance is non-Mulat oriented but yet they've identified themselves with religious Talib symbolism is why is this happen and can you turn it around or is it a thing we should strive for to turn this effort of identifying yourself with a kind of religious symbolism turn it around to something else to nationalism, something Actually Walter and for those who didn't hear him Walter is the dissertation advisor to Josh White our brilliant scholar and partner in this effort It's multi-layered it's not just a simple question of religion versus some secular approach the Tariqa Taliban of Pakistan uses religion but the Tariqa Taliban also has franchise arrangements with many different groups throughout Fata and they vary from agency to agency and some of these groups are just pure criminals as we identify them in our report and they're just using the name of religion as a way of aligning themselves with this broad movement that transcends tribal boundaries so yes there is a political significance to it they want self-governance they want rapid justice and they want to be able to call the shots themselves and the Tariqa Taliban is appealing to all of that and where it can it will use religion to help it and as Aziz mentioned and in the report we mentioned a quote from Baitullah Masood the founder of the Tariqa Taliban that it was the predator strikes that really help him recruit people Yes sir, could you identify yourself? Thank you, Paolo from Shiraq Shiraq Report I was actually very interested in the comments that you had made before about back on the subject of the Madrasas there is this sort of simplified caricature-resc view portrayed also by commentary in the west that is sort of the factories of radicalism this conveyor belt that spews of other fanatics suicide bombers etc and there is basically nothing we can do about it short of spraying them with PDT and killing everybody the picture that you are portraying is very different and much more nuanced in terms of the ability of the opportunity to engage the management of the faculty of these schools I am surprised that if this is indeed so and your efforts are under way that this is not something that is not more earnestly pursued as this may be the way to diffuse the bomb of further recruitment which is the weapon of Islamic radicalism or any other type of radicalism to find new people to the extent that your efforts seem to be reasonably successful why is it that this is not more publicized and that not more is done in terms of engaging the faculty in the direction Could you hand the mic to the person behind you I think I think we are successful in that that we get the engagement we get a lot of requests from Madrasas to say your training would like you to come and give us kind of a road map as how to reform our old Madrasas those are very very very good things and not all Madrasas are obviously not radical there are some very excellent Madrasas there and I think many people do notice our effort we avoid media like anything obviously because but of course you know it could say a very good thing about us and it can also say a few things about Madrasas and then Madrasas won't talk to me because something dragetory is being said by them so that is a difficult time a difficult thing and getting the exposure that we need in a safe in a safe way as well so I think those are some technical difficulties but I do think as a my boss call it asymmetrical war I don't like that word but anyway but that is probably is the most effective way to fight radicalization if you will especially in those areas and border areas if you look at the border area from all the way from Fata all the way to Pashin and Chaman Balochistan all of those provinces next to it in Afghanistan are on fire that is where most of the fight is going on so there is a lot of correlation between those two areas Madrasas I think people should take it more seriously I think we also tend to forget that from 60 to 100,000 young boys come out of these Madrasas every year and I would guarantee that 99% of them believe that America is the enemy and that we're out to destroy Islam and that 9-11 was a Mossad CIA plot so that's moving as I think you said before moving a huge boulder up the hill yes sir Mr. Muaz you talked about improving the trust between Pakistani army and US army my question is about the trust between Mr. 10% and Pakistani army he comes here and called Kashmiri terrorist he tell Bush that world is a better place because of Bush that most American would laugh at his statement so how can we take care of this problem unless we address these kind of very fundamental issue of corrupt people doing that country and probably he is in the making of few billion dollars and then leaving Pakistan can we address these problems really without solving this corruption problem in that country thanks this is beyond the scope of the paper but I will give you an answer I will give you an answer because you deserve an answer and the people of Pakistan deserve an answer I think the solution really is an ability of engaging the people of Pakistan in whatever decisions are made so when you have decisions particularly policy decisions that are made behind closed doors whether it involves an alliance with the United States after 9-11 by General Parvez Musharraf or whether it involves any relationship between the current government and the US government if it is not discussed openly then you lose the trust of the people and so the most important thing for Pakistan and for its polity and particularly for the new civilian government is to build that trust of the people of Pakistan that the government is there to serve them and not the other way around and once you do that you will have the possibility of longevity of civilian rule and you may be able to build on the public statement of the current army chief that he wants to keep the army out of politics but you know we've I wrote a whole book on this topic we've heard that tune before and that tune can change very rapidly if the situation deteriorates so the effort must be on the part of the friends of Pakistan as well as the people within Pakistan to try and have as open a discussion of these issues talk about Fata talk about India, talk about Kashmir and talk about the relationship with the U.S. so that there are no secret agreements and there's no wink or a nod yes sir Jack Keaton earlier today I skimmed all four or five hundred pages of the parole book of Patan five thousand years of history looking for a few pregnant sentences that we all should have learned before we went in there but he has a chapter called Patan Pushtoon Renaissance and we of course are dealing with the security issues the development issues that is not their evidence that at the same time these difficulties are overtaking us that there is a cultural renaissance going on among the Pushtoon people that will become a factor as we look into the future the poetry, the music, the culture their identification are those factors developing positively for the Pushtoons well Karo's book was written a few decades ago and at that time because it was so soon after independence there wasn't any threat emerging from Fata but he's right and you're right and when you go to Pakistan today and I'm not just talking of Fata alone in the northwest frontier province as well as in the rest of Pakistan there are lots of things that happen in spite of government it is probably one of the most active music and art seen in that part of the world there was a very fascinating review article by William Dalrymple recently on fiction emerging out of Pakistan I think the title was fiction from a jihadi state and his conclusion was that there's probably much better fiction coming out of Pakistan today than out of India which has much larger numbers of writers in English in particular so yes this is happening largely because of technology and because the world is now available to even the poorest man with the transistor radio in Fata and those are the mechanisms that we have to use to bring those people back on board and to empower them with knowledge and information so yes the renaissance is there it's in all the arts and cultures but if we lose the security battle and don't provide for economic and social development in Fata then the Taliban will come in and switch off the DVDs and the VCRs and the radios and the televisions and then you'll be back to that at the dark ages David we have some in the front row here our guest from the British House of Commons thank you very much it's a pleasure to be here and delighted to hear your thoughts looking at the recommendations I noticed that it's very much US centric and to do with Pakistan of course you mentioned the Darin line which just gives a hint of the British foreign secretary who's responsible for creating that line of legacy that the British have had in involvement in Pakistan is there anything is it now too late for the British themselves which have a long history of involvement with the area to use their influence or is this very much now a US issue you're right Tobias the British did bequeath a legacy drawing lines on both sides of Pakistan that reverberate in history so the lines on the border with India and Kashmir and then also the Darin line which is drawn much earlier of course Britain has an important role as part of the western community and also because the British army if Britain were to commit more of its meager forces to the area would probably help the US effort inside Afghanistan because they have not just a tradition but great knowledge of how to interact with the locals as was proven in the Basra area in Iraq by actually being in the population but I think in the end its money that talks in the United States has the largest pot of money available and you really if you're going to change things you have to make that economic impact very quickly so that people can see what the counterfactual to the current situation is that if you can give them the cash empower them to use that cash for their own good so to the extent that Britain can join that effort it certainly has the knowledge and I would certainly support that Yes sir, at the back Peter Koharis a lawyer and in the former life of relief and development worker in Asia and Africa I very much find compelling your analysis about socioeconomic development and empowering local people and really looking to them for what initiatives to be taken but I've read a lot about the insecurity in the region and the traditional government structures whether it was the Malix or others even the army being embarrassed and the traditional social structures tribal structures being defined specifically because they were a threat to the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda much the way Al-Qaeda targeted tribal leadership in the south of Iraq versus an Anbar where they weren't they didn't do that and the British had a difficult time of it in the south I wonder to what extent do you what can we do about that the lack of security the targeting of people who appear to be working with the government to be working against the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda because it's awfully difficult as you know to develop and start some of the programs you advocate if the security situation won't permit it and let's face it the Taliban and Al-Qaeda aren't foolish they understand that it's a threat to them I think I mentioned one specific recommendation that we had which was to change the approach to providing security so that it's community based by putting the retired F.C. and Pakistan army veterans from Fatah and making them responsible for security within their communities as well as security of development workers who are doing rebuilding and reconstruction work but there's another aspect to it which has been highlighted by the recent operation in Bajor where the local tribes themselves took on the job of policing as an adjunct to the frontier court the only danger in that is that because of intertribal rivalries when you end up arming one group with more sophisticated weapons than the other then you risk the problem of an imbalance in that military power once you exit and then if that particular tribe decides to turn against you you'll have a much more implacable foe so you really have to begin at the community level and have a presence that is seen by the locals so that they can then trust the security forces to protect them and not leave them at the mercy of the Taliban because the forces come on a patrol and then go back to their fortress and then the Taliban come in and basically using threats and coercion cover the people down we have time for three more there's a gentleman right here the lady at the back and you serve the front thank you sir I think Mr Nawaz you underestimate or under emphasize the role of the central government or central authority in the tribes in the Fata region in fact the system of paying Maliks was started by Shah Jahan to withdraw the forces and concentrate the monies on building Taj Mahal and the city of Shah Jahanabad so the system goes back for 340 years and in 1948 there was six brigades six Pakistan army brigades in the Fata region all of whom were withdrawn with the support of the tribals two wage war in Kashmir so there is a much more tighter relationship I'd like your comments on that yes the brigades that you referred to were withdrawn under other interestingly named operation Kersen which goes back to an earlier historical reference of the British aims in Central Asia there were two reasons one of course was to show the people of Fata that Pakistan was not a colonial force and therefore instead of having the garrisons in Wana and other places that there would only be the locals the frontier corps, the levees the all the locally recruited people providing security the other one I think you over estimate the number of people that came from all the Fata region into the Kashmir war there was a total number of about 5,000 odd tribal Dushkar that went into Kashmir that came from all over the northwest frontier province as well as Fata so it wasn't Fata centric yes the central government has a role but I believe and a lot of people in Pakistan believe that the relationship between the center and the periphery in Pakistan needs to be readjusted because the government of Pakistan cannot control everything from the center and the only way of bringing the Luchistan and the northwest frontier province and Fata and Sin to feel that their part of the federation is by giving them much more authority to manage their own affairs Lady at the back Bridget Kustin U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom you mentioned the current agency and the ongoing Shiasuni conflict in your remarks and I didn't see that issue addressed specifically in any of the recommendations so what recommendations do you have for the Pakistani government with respect to that ongoing conflict as well as the populations of internally displaced people who are from current agency well my recommendation would be first of all to appeal to Pakistan's friends in Iran and the Arabian Peninsula at source any financing of those activities secondly, and this is an internal matter for Pakistan to effectively seal the entry into Fata so that the Punjabi militants that are fueling that that fight and that are training the Taliban and other militants in advanced warfare against the Pakistani state can be controlled and of course the most important one coming after the Mumbai attacks is to somehow de-weaponize those Punjabi militant groups in central and southern Punjab because till you do that you will always have this risk you have to remember that in 2008 there were over 60 suicide bombings in Pakistan and in 2007 there were about 60 and how you count them and in 2007 something like 36 of them were against the military and so these are the people that have trained the terrorists to use suicide bombing against the Pakistani state so you have to control them internally that was a much broader issue so we were trying to get the report as briefly as possible but you can see that it wasn't as brief as we wanted it to be yes sir hi Shurya my question is sort of general it seems to me I would have liked to see an integrated recommendation of the Pakistan government and the military it seems to me that that is central to the progress in the future the second thing is I feel the role of India is very important and while you mention the difficulties I think that should not be not included in such a report thank you Ahmed again this was one of those broader issues that we only referred to in some of our discussion when you see the report in detail you will see that the conflict with India or the threat of conflict with India still informs the Pakistan army and still informs a lot of the political discussion within the country and so that really remains the key element that once that conflict is removed from the scene you have all kinds of things opening up including the point that Arno made which is instead of 16 cents to the dollar available for development you may have 40 or 50 cents to the dollar available for development instead of currently where you have reported something like 40 cents going to the armed forces and the rest primarily going to debt servicing so the India Pakistan solution would open up all these possibilities and for that not just the Indian and Pakistani government but the people of India and Pakistan need to push their governments in that direction and surely the final settlement in Afghanistan if one comes will obviously India have to be part of the solution that brings us to the end of this afternoon session on federally administered tribal areas in Pakistan and I think we owe a big debt of gratitude to our two experts