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rug

(82,333 posts) Thu Jun 7, 2012, 06:52 PM Jun 2012

FATA is not a country in Africa

June 7, 2012
By Myra MacDonald

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is using increasingly forthright terms to describe the spillover of the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in its campaign of drone strikes. “We are fighting a war in the FATA, we are fighting a war against terrorism,” he said during a visit to India. The idea that the United States is at war inside Pakistan, albeit in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, is not new. But the use of language is significant, requiring as Spencer Ackerman noted at Danger Room, “a war-weary (US) public to get used to fighting what’s effectively a third war in a decade, even if this one relies far more on remote controlled robots than ground troops”.

Panetta’s choice of words (and venue for delivering them) may not go down too well with Pakistani authorities in Islamabad/Rawalpindi. It is not particularly promising for the people of FATA either, who find themselves caught in the middle of a shadow war between the United States and Pakistan. But in one respect, it is not necessarily a bad thing. Rarely has the United States fought a war in a place about which it knows so little. If Panetta’s comments force people to learn about FATA, it might even lift us out of what until now has been a polemical debate between supporters and opponents of drone strikes, with little attention paid to the voices of people who actually live there.

For a start, we have to understand that not only are those voices not heard, but they are actively marginalised. For the U.S. administration, arguing that drone attacks are legal, ethical and wise, and a complicit U.S. public, the people on the ground are best dismissed as turbaned, bearded dangerous folks living in “the tribal badlands” (a phrase that really ought to be banned along with “Graveyard of Empires” and “the Great Game”.) For opponents of drones in Pakistan, their voices are marginalised by a virulent strain of anti-Americanism through which political popularity or greater bargaining power in negotiations with the United States can best be attained by whipping up rage about the drone strikes.

This is, incidentally, not to defend drones – there are many reasons to question them, from the steady degradation of respect for the rule of law, to the damage to the west’s own concept of itself as a democratic role model, to the risk that decapitating known leaders allows them to be replaced by even more ruthless men. It is, however, to suggest that the motives of some of those opposing drone strikes should not be taken at face value. In the pernicious propaganda war between the United States and Pakistan, nothing should be taken at face value, including the many sweeping assertions made about the impact of drones on Pakistani society as a whole. (For that reason, nor should we extrapolate from the Pakistani experience and superimpose it on the debate on the merits of drone strikes in Yemen – that country has its own specific issues.)

http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2012/06/07/fata-is-not-a-country-in-africa/

It's easier to drop drones on acronyms than people.

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FATA is not a country in Africa (Original Post) rug Jun 2012 OP

Odd article. Igel Jun 2012 #1

Igel

(35,319 posts)

1. Odd article.

Reply to rug (Original post)

Thu Jun 7, 2012, 10:06 PM

Jun 2012

A few misparsings (the elders from Waziristan do, in fact, seldom get out of the area).

Isolation can go either way. You can be isolated, say, because you live up in an area of Tennessee that sees few outsiders, even if your cousins do go to Nashville. Or you can be isolated because you go nowhere.

In the case of Waziristan, there's an interesting thesis that a similar kind of quasi-religious insurgency between the Waziris and another group (whose name eludes me just now) in the '50s and '60s was due to a kind of honor/wealth imbalance. Both had been poor and the Waziris had the upper economic hand. But more of the other tribe had emigrated and were sending money back so the Waziris no longer had more economic prestige. This upset the balance of prestige and honor and the only recompense was to try to restore the balance. This could be done by dimishing wealth or wealth-providers.

So the writer points out waves of out-migration, and then misses confirmation of it later. "Pathan", which the "British used to call the Pashtun," is apparently a no-no. It's just the Hindi/Urdu form of "Pakhtun" (that "h" in Pathan is an h: you'd syllabify it Pat-han, there's no "th sound" there). It was used to name the Pakhtun that lived outside of the Pashto area in S. Asia. The British base of governing was in the Indo-Pak area, so they used the familiar term. Less an exonym then the result of metathesis.

And the poll that she refers to was widely referred to in a small set of circles last winter. Most didn't like it. It's a reasonable poll with completely reasonable results, but it has trouble making it past a lot of people's perception filter. If it's right, then they're wrong, and that's an untenable assumption. The Pakhtuns apparently have more good-will towards the US government than Americans do--and we ain't talking Tea Partiers.

Still, there's a reason the area's the FATA, and not the LATA ("locally administered tribal area&quot or even a part of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the next over canton. The people there like democracy, but it's rather the same as when the ardent communists I'd talk with talked about "demokratija". The Russian word may translate as "democracy," but there were a number of meanings, depending on who I talked to. It was tricky keeping them straight. It's like asking for the "toilet" in Pushkino--I went in expecting a white porcelain bowl to crap in, one that I could flush; instead I found a hole in the ground with foot pads to keep my shoe's soles out of the sludge.

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