Pakistan to try diplomacy in tribal regions near Afghanistan

Pakistan to try diplomacy in tribal regions near Afghanistan
By Ismail Khan
Monday, July 16, 2007
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PESHAWAR, Pakistan: In hopes of restoring a fragile peace with militant groups in the region along its border with Afghanistan, the Pakistani government dispatched a team of tribal elders there on Monday to meet with leaders of the groups.
The government's previous peace pact unraveled after government troops stormed the Red Mosque compound in the Pakistani capital and routed the militants holed up there, ending a long siege.
Bombings and suicide attacks in the tribal region over the weekend claimed more than 70 lives, nearly as many as the government said had been killed in the Red Mosque fighting.
Taliban leaders in North Waziristan, one of the border areas, called off the old peace deal, signed with the government last September, after the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, deployed troops to set up several checkpoints.
It was the latest in a series of steps taken by the Pakistani government in recent years, some of them apparently contradictory, in an effort to restore order to the mountainous border districts, which are called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas even though the central government has little control over them.
Civilian administration has steadily eroded in the tribal areas since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Musharraf regime has alternately tried to bludgeon, buy off and appease the militants operating in the tribal areas, at times sacrificing its own troops, at other times negotiating deals with some of the most feared militant commanders.
The consequences of that policy have not been entirely lost on the government. In early June, the National Security Council was warned of the obvious: that the Taliban had re-grouped and reorganized inside Pakistan.
What connections the Taliban or Al Qaeda may have had to the militants holed up in the Red Mosque remain unclear; all that is known is that the radical clerics who led the mosque and its adjoining seminary had been agitating for Taliban-style rule in Pakistan.
For a long time they also enjoyed the support of the government. But they became an embarrassment for the Musharraf administration after they sent "vice squads" across the capital, most recently kidnapping several Chinese nationals who worked in an acupuncture clinic that the seminary students claimed was really a brothel.
The eight-day siege of the mosque and its adjacent seminary for women and girls ended last Wednesday, after a deafening 36-hour firefight. The military said that 76 people were killed in the operation.
Government officials have said in recent days that they suspect that the dead included foreign fighters. The government has also repeatedly said that the fighters in the mosque complex surrounded themselves with civilian hostages, but they furnished no details.
A letter circulated on Monday by the Taliban in North Waziristan said once again that the peace deal with the government had been scrapped "in the larger public interest," and warned tribal police not to assist the military and paramilitary troops.
The letter urged tribal elders not to cooperate with the government, but it also called on local tribesmen to refrain from harming civil servants working for public service departments like health, education, and agriculture. "Anyone caught by the Taliban while causing any harm to employees of these departments would be considered thieves and would be punished publicly," the letter said.
The government's team of tribal envoys was led by a member of Parliament named Nek Zaman, who met with various militant commanders at a seminary on Monday to discuss the September peace accord.
Under that truce, the military agreed to pull troops back to their barracks, in exchange for the militants suspending their attacks both in Pakistan and across the border in Afghanistan. Government officials said tribal elders would enforce the peace deal in return for large amounts of financial aid.
Critics said the deal merely allowed the Taliban and Al Qaeda to regroup and plan fresh attacks.
The chief minister of the Northwest Frontier Province, Akram Khan Durrani, warned at a news conference on Monday that any annulment of the peace pact would have dangerous repercussions for the country.
General Musharraf faces mounting criticism from the country's religious right in the aftermath of the Red Mosque standoff, as well as months of pro-democracy protests from a wide cross section of Pakistani citizens.