"It's a great concept, but it's five years too late," commented former State Department official and veteran observer Marvin Weinbaum. He said al-Qaida militants and their sympathizers among local Pashtuns had "chased from the scene or killed" traditional tribal leaders, with whom a development-for-peace quid pro quo might have been established.

Weinbaum is far from the harshest critic of the program, which U.S. officials say will pump $350 million a year for five years into the border belt, divided into seven semiautonomous provinces or FATAs, for Federally Administered Tribal Agencies, and legendarily home to some of the most hostile terrain and fearsome warriors on the planet.

Most of that money is from the Pakistani government, but $150 million a year will come from the United States if Congress approves President Bush's request.

Author Ahmed Rashid, one of the foremost experts on the region, said that since it became a bolt-hole for the al-Qaida cadres fleeing the U.S. military and their allies in Afghanistan in 2001, the FATAs had been the site of what he likened to "ethnic cleansing."

"In three or four out of seven of those agencies there is literally no one there except the (Pakistani) military and the Taliban," he said.

"Who is the (development aid) money going to go to?" he asked.

He echoed the bleak pronouncements of other regional experts about the area, where the martial traditions of the fiercely independent Pashtun tribesmen have morphed into violent extremism "under the shadow of al-Qaida," as Rashid puts it.

"The Pakistani Taliban" -- now dominant in so many of the tribal areas -- "were the fixers who got al-Qaida out of Afghanistan" after the U.S. invasion in 2001, he said.

"These fixers earned a lot of money �� a lot of clout," and became militia commanders who grew to dominate local communities, cowering, killing or expelling any traditional leaders who might challenge their authority.

Rashid said they were "much more ideologically motivated" than their Taliban compatriots among the Pashtuns of Balochistan.

Officials from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development testified recently in the Senate.

"The government of Pakistan has a very comprehensive, and we believe well-designed, development plan to address the root causes of extremism in the FATA region," said U.S. AID Acting Deputy Administrator James Kunder. "We plan to be major supporters of that effort."

State Department South Asia chief Richard Boucher said the plan was a product of the tact that it "has become clear to Islamabad, as it has to America, that a purely military solution will not work" in the tribal areas.

"What is required," said Boucher, "is a comprehensive 'frontier strategy' consisting of military and civilian security, social and economic development and political engagement in these ungoverned areas."

Boucher said the plan was aiming high. "That means nothing less than bringing the frontier areas, traditionally under-governed and under-developed, into the mainstream of the Pakistani body politic."

Weinbaum said that another problem was that any projects associated with the U.S. aid program in the tribal areas would be a natural target and hard to protect. "We are not well liked there," he said.

"The United States has to keep its imprint of everything or it will be seen as tainted," he said, adding, "Even some of our friends won't take our money because they're afraid of being associated with us."

"That is an area where we can provoke a reaction if we don't go in in a measured and an analytical and thorough fashion," acknowledged Kunder at the Senate hearing. "But," he added, "we believe there are real development opportunities in the northwest and we believe we plan to increase dramatically our support to that region."

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