Afghan Pashtun tribes and could go a long way towards making

Marshall Plan for FATA

Success in the Pakistani tribal belt can offer an incentive to the Afghan Pashtun tribes and could go a long way towards making the Afghanistan effort a success

By Shaukat Qadir

However, it never ceases to amaze me that so many of our own analysts, even Pashtun tribesmen, accept, even support these conclusions; people who should really know better, accept conclusions far divorced from ground realities and the social psyche of the tribals. Any effort that frontally assaults centuries-old traditions and customs of these tribes is doomed to failure at the outset.

These are people bred in a harsh, sparsely populated region, who live by their traditional code; a land with very little water, where the wealthy have large land holdings and some agriculture, but earn mostly from governmental grants and smuggling, while the poor generally breed a handful of goats and need every available hand to survive; and where women have never enjoyed any rights.

The concept of male superiority is as old as evolution and for people seeped in traditions and who are burning or bombing girls’ schools in their area, any direct attack on their customs and traditions through education will be resisted tooth and nail. It might sound blasphemous to the educated mind, but the truth is that it will take a generation of education for gender issues to be debated and, at least another generation before they can be genuinely implemented. Even in the UK, the pillar of democracy, women’s suffrage was established as recently as 1933.

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