A peace deal is being negotiated, we are informed. Details are filtering in from the cold, as it were, and they are sparse. Such is the opacity with which the state is operating on this front in the Afghan capital with the proscribed TTP.
The stumbling blocks: the TTP wants a reversal of the merger of Fata with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the imposition of what it calls sharia law. The former, they were told, isn’t on the table; the 25th amendment saw to this. The latter isn’t clear, but some captured TTP operatives are reportedly going to be released as a confidence building measure. The Pakistani side in these Afghan-Taliban-facilitated negotiations is also asking for something unacceptable to the other side: the complete dismemberment of the TTP as an armed militant group.
There is much to unpack here. First of all, as per all appearances it is the military establishment that is carrying out these negotiations. If history has ever been an indicator, that has never worked out well. Without political ownership, nay, political stewardship, such negotiations can never work. Let us consider why the reversal of the Fata merger is impossible. Because it required a constitutional amendment? But would it have been okay if the TTP wanted something that could have been done away with through simple legislation? How is even that something that unelected institutions can offer to someone?
As far as the perceived flexibility of the Pakistani side on the whole sharia thing is concerned, a prudent and principled apex judiciary can and should strike any such arrangement down. Why should the residents of a particular part of the country be subjected to another set of laws? Yes, the provinces do make their own laws but only after a deliberative process in a parliament of representatives. How can such an offer be made?
Lastly, even the TTP brought to the negotiations a document that said that autonomy to the tribal areas was promised by the Quaid himself. That is a common mistake many in Pakistan make, as well as the foreign press, when they used to refer to Fata as “Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal areas.” That is a farce. Pakistan’s provinces proper were far more autonomous than that federally run gulag, still subject to the horrid FCR, with ghastly tools like the principle of collective responsibility.
It is a travesty that Fata remained Fata for as long as it did. We should make sure it is integrated even more into the rest of Pakistan rather than for the merger to be one only in name.
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