The former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is not what the 25th Constitutional Amendment of 2018 aimed to transform it into. This amendment incorporated the area into the Pakistani Constitution, creating space for the establishment of institutions—a window of opportunity that proved to be brief, closing in August 2021, when NATO troops withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban regime was restored to power. The Taliban's return did not create an institutional vacuum in the merged districts; it exposed and exploited one that had never been filled.

To understand the merger's intentions, it is essential to examine how the governance process in the tribal areas differed before the amendment. The belt was administered under the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), which remained in place for more than a hundred years and was characterized by collective punishment, administrative arrest, and discretionary justice rather than court-based justice. Pakistan continued this tradition between 1947 and 2018, maintaining the area under an exceptional legal and constitutional status for another 70 years. Eight years later, the legal change is complete, at least on paper. Institutional change has barely begun.

The vacuum did not remain empty. Since 2021, the number of insurgent attacks has increased in the merged districts as well as across the rest of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with militants also expanding their attacks to other Pakistani cities, including Islamabad and Karachi. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has resurged across most of the tribal belt, attacking security forces, tribal elders, and the few administrative officers working to keep civilian institutions together. However, they are not the only militant group that has increased its activities. In North Waziristan, several groups have retained their command structures. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar is carrying out attacks in Bajaur and Mohmand under its own leadership, whereas the Islamic State Khorasan Province occasionally launches attacks there, resulting in even more casualties in the same districts. Hence, the security landscape is far more fragmented than during the unified war a decade ago. There were more than 1,600 attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2025, the highest number in recent years and 48 percent higher than the previous year's total. The state has responded with operations, curfews, and intelligence-based actions. What it has not delivered is the one thing that would actually matter: functioning civilian institutions promised by the merger.

This gap is felt on the ground. Ibrahim Shinwari, a senior........

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