One of the results of the violent and shadowy post-9/11 clash between the interests of the Pakistani and American security states is the emergence of a fractured, but destructive 'Taliban' polity centered on North Waziristan. The 200+ CIA drone strikes in this area cannot and do not attempt to alter facts on the ground. The Pakistan Army tolerates drone strikes as well as hostile elements of the Taliban movement to preserve a deniable space needed to pursue its interests in Afghanistan and the region. Thus, for the first time it is the state east of the Khyber Pass rather than the people of the 'Tribal Agencies’ that resists the deeper integration of these areas with the plains of the Indus. The deliberately liminal sovereignty in the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands is magnified by the radical social and political change in the last decade driven by a welter of largely Deobandi affiliated militant groups. Sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, these groups are divided both by conflicting local clan affiliations and notions of nationalist vs. transnationalist political religiosity. All of these unresolved contradictions and their regional reverberations will outlast current debates over the scope and intensity of direct US involvement in the area. At the deepest level they reflect the intense competition to define and secure what constitutes 'authentic' political and religious identity and authority in South and Central Asia. These contradictions and competitions continue to take new forms under conditions of modernity and globalisation, even while retaining deep roots in the colonial-era struggles of the Great Game and Partition. Unfortunately, what is often lost in all of this are the aspirations and needs of ordinary people in Waziristan and the tribal areas for development and democratisation on their own terms.