What the merger gave us — and what it cost

Eight years on, the headline is settled. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas — Bajaur among them — are no longer a separate legal universe. The Frontier Crimes Regulations are gone. Residents of the merged districts vote in provincial elections, file civil cases in ordinary courts, and live, on paper, as full citizens of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

That is real, and it should not be flattened into cynicism. People who fought for that outcome — and people who paid for the fight — deserve to see it acknowledged.

And yet

The state arrived selectively. Schools opened, then ran short of teachers. Court rooms were built, then waited months for a sitting judge. Police stations took over jurisdiction the political agents used to hold, but inherited none of the local knowledge that made the old system, for all its brutality, at least legible to the people inside it.

This is the hard part of inclusion: the constituency that argued hardest for it now has to argue for the delivery that was implied. That second argument is less photogenic. It is the work that comes after the headline.