Taliban Sets Up Permanent Courts in Pakistan's Tribal Areas

A report released today (.pdf) by Dan Markey, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, outlines the frustrations of U.S. efforts to tame Taliban fighters operating in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or the FATA, the region in which most terrorism analysts believe Osama Bin Laden is probably hiding. Writes Markey:

Nearly seven years after 9/11, neither the United States nor Pakistan has fully come to terms with the enormity of the challenge in the tribal belt. Washington has failed to convince Pakistanis that the United States has positive intentions in the region and is committed to staying the course long enough to implement lasting, constructive change. Pakistan, for its part, has demonstrated a disturbing lack of capacity and, all too often, an apparent lack of will to tackle head-on the security, political, or developmental deficits that have produced an explosion of terrorism and extremism within its borders and beyond.

Also today, reports the BBC, there is new evidence that the Taliban is settling down in the tribal areas, relatively untroubled by U.S. and Pakistani attempts to disrupt its operations. Until now, to enforce its strict variant of Sharia law, the Taliban has operated mobile courts, handling cases dealing with everything from land transactions to family disputes to spying. But according to a Taliban spokesman, it has now divided the northwest Mohmand district into four judicial areas. Each one features a permanent court staffed by two judges. These join similar courts said to already be operating in the neighboring Bajaur district.

The fact that Taliban courts can operate from fixed addresses without fear of outside intervention demonstrates, "the diminishing authority of the central and local governments," said the spokesman.