Pakistan seeks reform on Afghan border

ISLAMABAD — Awash with guns, opium, bands of armed Islamic militants, medieval laws, smugglers, rugged tribesmen and breathtaking mountains, Pakistan’s remote Afghan border is one of the wildest places on earth.

But as the hunt intensifies for Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda fighters, pressure is growing to tame the semiautonomous region and impose 21st-century courts on a people who have defied conquest and state authority for centuries.

A raid last month by thousands of Pakistani troops on hundreds of suspected al Qaeda and other militants in the South Waziristan tribal district, where at least 120 persons died, has thrust the issue of reforming the area into national debate.

“What this whole effort has lacked is a political plan as to what this region’s future status will be,” said Ahmed Rashid, a leading Pakistani author.

Nearly the size of Belgium, the barren, 10,200-square-mile Federally Administered Tribal Area is a haven for al Qaeda and fundamentalist Taliban forces accused of attacks on U.S. troops across the Afghan border, U.S. officials say.

Hundreds of Arab, Afghan, Uzbek, Chechen and other foreign militants, drawn there since the 1980s when the U.S. government funded bands of Islamic fighters to drive the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, are believed to have escaped the recent fighting.

With tens of thousands of troops now in the region, Pakistan’s authorities have given tribal elders until April 20 to expel the militants or risk more bloodshed.

“Pakistan has had to pay a high price for tolerating the strange exclusiveness of the area. This is unacceptable,” the News daily newspaper said in an editorial.

President Pervez Musharraf said improving living conditions for the area’s 6 million poor residents, mostly ethnic Pashtuns, and folding the devout Muslim enclave into the mainstream is a priority.

In a TV interview late last month, he stopped short of forecasting an end to the region’s curious self-rule, saying now was not the time. He said development would press ahead, led by army engineers and backed by $54 million from Washington.

The roughly 50,000 troops deployed there since 2002 — the biggest incursion in the belt since Pakistan gained independence from Britain in 1947 — have helped open 550 schools, set up health clinics, planted trees and built 800 miles of road.

“When we sent the army inside in all tribal agencies, the objective was not to hunt al Qaeda. … It was to integrate them into Pakistan,” Gen. Musharraf said.

That has helped the government break down some tribal resistance.

“There was opposition in the past because they thought roads bring government,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Pashtun tribesman and newspaper editor in the northwest.

“But now, whenever a dignitary goes there, whether it’s an army general or a governor or a minister, invariably they make a demand for girls’ schools, roads, everything,” he said.

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