Word: frontier
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That's because this Pakistani frontier city, despite its large army garrison dating back to the British colonial days, had been in the grips of the Taliban's reign of fear. Nearly twice a week, they would send suicide bombers - often God-struck kids in their early teens - down from training camps in the mountains to blow themselves up at a busy crossroads or police station. They kidnapped rich businessmen, doctors and lawyers for ransom. And they silenced the music, shutting shops and banning songs at rowdy Pashtun tribal weddings, calling them "un-Islamic...
...system of maliks," says General Khan. "Now any crook with a cell phone can call up a gang of his militant friends for any kind of mischief, and everyone is too afraid to stop them." His former colleague, Brigadier Mahmoud Shah, formerly in charge of security for the Northwest Frontier Province, concurs. "It's a twilight zone up there," he says, even in the areas recently cleared of militants. (See TIME's cover story on taking the fight to the Taliban in Afghanistan...
Pakistani military officers, politicians and diplomats say that Islamabad has a short window of opportunity to improve the lives of the frontier tribesmen. Otherwise, they will turn angrily against Islamabad and wave in the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters who are now scattered in the mountains. "We need to bring in reforms swiftly," says Shah...
Washington agrees with this urgency. In 2007, the Bush Administration approved $750 million to be spent in the Northwest Frontier Province over the next five years to catapult the poor, lawless region into the 21st century, creating schools and jobs and repairing the battered civil society. But because of fears that there were no safeguards to keep corrupt officials from siphoning off the funds, and because much of the region has been off-limits to aid workers due to militancy, only a tenth of that amount has been spent. Nor can aid wait: the U.N. reckons that over 1.63 million...
Quietly, U.S. diplomats, aid workers and military trainers have been working in the frontier tribal areas with the army and whatever brave tribal maliks they can find. The idea, say Pakistani military officials, is to identify fast projects - small dams or marble quarries, for example - and get them built and working under the protection of those tribes that will benefit directly. Only this way, say officials, can the tribes turn away from the militant-run enterprises - banditry and running guns and drugs - that earn them money...