The biggest security challenge to the United States comes from a place you may never have heard of.

It's called the FATA.

That's the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, where al-Qaida and other jihadi groups have established safe havens along the Afghan border. So far, no one's figured out how to deal with the problem.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf failed to dislodge the jihadis by force; he limited U.S. attacks to remotely piloted Predator aircraft.

Now, Pakistan's new civilian leaders have come up with a new formula that downplays military strikes in favor of negotiations with militants. Administration officials fear this will backfire.

Yet Pakistan's strategy looks remarkably similar to the formula that helped rid Iraq's Anbar province of al-Qaida: Help tribal leaders help themselves.

Call it the Anbar model: aiding tribal elders who want to push out violent intruders by giving them political and economic incentives, along with military aid.

Of course, Pakistani officials would never publicly compare the FATA problem with Anbar, and there are innumerable differences between the two areas.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, many Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida leaders took refuge in Pakistan's tribal areas. Pakistani jihadis migrated there, too. In a region that had been woefully neglected and lacks jobs, and is only informally governed by Islamabad, tribesmen could be wooed to join the jihadis. A lack of law and order made it easy for militants to intimidate tribal leaders.

Attacks by the Pakistani army, whose troops are mostly ethnic Punjabis, further alienated FATA's Pushtun tribes. Strikes by U.S. missiles caused collateral damage among civilians.

Many Pakistanis came to view military attacks on FATA as a war waged on America's behalf. Although jihadis have been blowing up Pakistani civilians and killed former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the fight against Islamist militants was seen as "America's war."

This is the outlook that Pakistan's newly elected government wants to change.

"We have to win the people on our side. We don't want Pakistanis to think we are unfair to our own people," I was told by Husain Haqqani, who will become Pakistan's new ambassador to the United States next month.

The risky part of this strategy is negotiations with militant tribes along in the Afghan border area. This includes tribes led by a man accused of organizing suicide bombs and Bhutto's murder — Baitullah Mehsud.

"The deal is not with Mehsud but with the people around him," Haqqani insists. He says the deal would require tribal members to lay down their arms, and to pledge they won't harbor militants or let their area be used as a base for attacks against other countries — like Afghanistan or Western nations.

After a test period, tribes that won't turn over terrorists would face military action. "It's not an either/or," Haqqani said. "We can speak softly and carry a big stick."

The key to the strategy will be a Pakistani government effort to aid tribes that are fed up with being pushed around by hard-core militants — as U.S. commanders aided Iraqi tribal leaders in Anbar. If sufficiently encouraged, tribal elders could rally their own militias as did tribal chiefs in Anbar. The government would also put money and effort into upgrading the Frontier Constabulary, made up of tribesmen who protect the border.

A crucial part of the plan would be to funnel large amounts of development aid into the FATA and to strengthen political ties to the tribal areas.

U.S. aid money would be important. After years of relying only on Pakistan's military to deal with the FATA problem, the Bush administration has now allotted $186.7 million in fiscal 2007 to help build schools and hospitals in the tribal areas.

Yes, the strategy is risky. Hard-core militants may use a cease-fire to reorganize and rearm. Critics point out that Musharraf engineered a cease-fire with militants two years ago that quickly collapsed.

Haqqani says the agreement Musharraf signed was "with the Pakistani Taliban. We're signing with the tribes. There is a distinction between tribals and terrorists." That is the hope.

The virtue of the government's plan is that it aims to enlist Pakistanis themselves in the effort to stabilize the tribal areas. By offering the tribes an alternative to war, it exposes and isolates the militants who prefer violence.

If militants reject the truce, it would give the government a solid argument for using force.

"Pakistan must fight terrorism for Pakistan's sake," the country's new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, wrote in The Washington Post. If his strategy can convince the Pakistani public that the struggle against jihadis is their fight, too, it has a chance to succeed.


Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Reach her at trubin@phillynews.com.