ABSTRACT
The Pakistani state diagnoses the challenge Once the US had cajoled it into action the Pakistani state proceeded to determine which armed groups it would seek to crack down on. It did so by diagnosing the problem as one caused by so-called ‘foreign fighters’ who needed to be rooted out of Pakistan. Understanding these foreign fighters to be seeking refuge with the Pashtun tribes along the border with Afghanistan, the Pakistani state sought to force these tribesmen to give up the foreigners. To do so, it used the levers inherited from the British era. Pakistan’s regional administrators sought to force the tribes to surrender the outlaws by using economic blockades, while the paramilitaries of the Frontier Corps attempted to apprehend those it believed it had identified to be foreign fighters and their tribal hosts. Pakistani officials also transferred the very coercive threat enunciated by US Deputy Secretary of State Armitage to President Musharraf immediately after 9/11 – that Pakistan faced the wrath of the US military – to the inhabitants of the tribal areas in order to threaten them to surrender the foreign fighters.
