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Overview

FATA comprises seven independent tribal agencies and six smaller frontier regions in the northwest of Pakistan. The agencies include Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, North Waziristan and South Waziristan. These agencies are further divided into Assistant Political Agencies, subdivisions and tehsils. The six frontier regions are comprised of Bannu, Dera Ismail Khan, Kohat, Laki Marwat, Peshwar, and Tank. These regions are also called settled areas and the District Coordination Officers are responsible for the administration of these regions. Their headquarters are known as the FATA Secretariat in Peshawar which reports to the Governor of KP.

According to Article 248 (3) of the Constitution of Pakistan, FATA comes directly under the control of the President of Pakistan. However, the federal government is given partial control over the governance of the area through the Governor of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province (formerly the North West Frontier Province) who is nominated by the President of Pakistan.

Ever since Pakistan allied with the United States in the ‘War on Terror’, much of FATA is effectively controlled by groups loosely known as the ‘Pakistani Taliban’, although the Pakistan army is waging a counter-insurgency war in the area to assist the state to regain control over the region.3
FATA shares a boundary with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Punjab in the east and Balochistan in the south, whereas in the west is the Durand Line beyond which lies Afghanistan. According to the census of 1998, the estimated population of the area was 3,176,000. About 4 per cent of the total population was living in towns and 96 per cent lived in the rural areas at that time. The area is mainly populated by Pashtun tribes.

The people of FATA have no separate legislative assembly but they are represented in the National Assembly of Pakistan by 12 independent elected Members of the National Assembly and in the Senate by eight senators who are elected by the 12 MNAs.

The economy is chiefly pastoral due to the tribal nature of the society. Being a mountainous area, only ten per cent of the land is arable. The majority of the rural population depends on forestry, livestock, and crops (rice, wheat, maize). However, the parallel informal economy based on the trafficking of opium sustains a large percentage of the people of this area. The level of illiteracy is very high with only 40 per cent of men and 3 per cent of women able to read and write (CAMP 2009)4 . The total literacy rate was 17.42 per cent in the census of 1998 (Leghari 2009)5.

FATA lacks in almost every denominator of civil society; there are no banks (in the modern sense of the term) in the area; there is no adequate infrastructure to support sustainable means of transportation; no estimable developments have taken place in the fields of education, health, energy, or the agriculture sector over the last sixty-three years since Independence. There are only 33 hospitals and 301 dispensaries which cater to the entire region and which are, obviously, unable to meet the basic health needs of the population, (Leghari 2009).