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Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_muhammad_070716_make_no_deal_with_te.htm

July 16, 2007

Make No Deal With Terrorists

By Muhammad Khurshid

The current situation has proved that deals made by the government of Pakistan with terrorists and Taliban in tribal areas have strengthened the position of terrorists. The rulers at that time provided a chance for them to make their position stronger. Now the situation has changed altogether as the terrorists announced breaking of the deal. They have started attacks on government forces.

According to a newspaper report, Taliban militants in North Waziristan Agency announced that they were pulling out of a peace deal they signed with the government last year.

“We are ending the agreement today,” the Taliban shura or council stated in pamphlets distributed in Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan. “We had struck the truce with the government to save people’s lives and property, but today we announce the truce’s termination again for the sake of the people.”

The Taliban said the government had repeatedly violated the terms of the agreement. Security forces had attacked the Taliban in Dwatoi, Saidgai, Paryat and Godai Waila. The government had also backtracked on its promise to compensate tribesmen and solve their problems with check-posts, the Taliban statement said. “So we are left with no option but to end the truce.” The Taliban warned Khasadar and levies personnel not to perform official duties with army and paramilitary troops, otherwise they would also be attacked.

The Taliban also announced amnesty for pro-government tribal elders, but warned that they should not conduct any jirgas with the government. Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao told a private channel that it was the Taliban who violated the agreement. “They violated the truce by challenging the government’s writ and attacking government installations, the army and innocent people,” the interior minister said. He said the government would maintain its writ at all cost and would deal strictly with those taking the law into their own hands.

Situation in other parts of the country is also critical. Newspapers have been writing editorials on the situation. One of the newspaper stated that two attacks in two days have put the government on notice about the backlash to the Lal Masjid operation.

At least 12 security men were killed and over 20 wounded in a suicide attack against a convoy of the Frontier Force and army troops in Swat on Sunday July 15. At least 24 paramilitary troops died and 27 others injured when a suicide bomber rammed an explosives-packed car into their convoy on Saturday July 14 in one of the deadliest attacks on the security forces in North Waziristan this year. Army troops also came under attack in Bannu and Dir districts in which a paramilitary soldier was killed by masked gunmen on the Miranshah-Bannu road.

Suicide-bombing has gone up another notch. It is now the explosives-packed car which is being used, an Al Qaeda trade mark known in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, there would have been more casualties if the Peshawar police had not discovered two anti-tank mines weighing 4-5 kilograms hooked up to a timer in a car abandoned in front of a bank in the East Cantonment police precincts. A Frontier Constabulary soldier was killed and three others injured in an ambush in a precinct of Quetta by unknown assailants the same day.

The president of the Muttahida Majlis Amal (MMA) and chief of the Jama’at-e Islami, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, says he will submit his resignation in the next session of the National Assembly to protest the “massacre” of Lal Masjid, thus putting the dominant component of the alliance, the JUI, under pressure. He has also objected to the mobilisation of troops in the Malakand-Swat-Dir area without a formal “go-ahead” from the MMA government in Peshawar. His man in the NWFP cabinet, “senior minister” Mr Sirajul Haq, convened a press conference to go on record against the mobilisation which he said was done without taking the Peshawar government into confidence. The NWFP chief minister, Mr Akram Khan Durrani, might also speak later as he has been accusing the “intelligence agencies” of causing terrorist incidents in the province.

After the all-parties conference of the opposition in London announced the formation of a movement called APCDM, all the opposition parties, except the PPP for the time being, are formally committed to starting an agitation, the only caveat being that there is still no agreement among the big parties, the PPP and the JUI, on when to resign from the assemblies and come out on the roads. This means that Qazi Hussain Ahmad’s “resignation” is clearly aimed at triggering the movement now when the iron is hot in the post-Lal Masjid period. In his reckoning, a crucial ingredient in the agitation would be the madrassa zealots of the Deobandi federation of seminaries called Wafaqul Madaris Arabiya. Its students are already on the roads protesting the “betrayal” of the pledges made by the government to Wafaq over the Lal Masjid standoff. This connection is critical.

It is critical because the government is also planning to woo the Wafaq most vigorously in the coming days. It knows that Wafaq is fundamentally opposed to the Musharraf government but it is also aware of the giant steps it has been able to take under Musharraf to increase its presence in the country. The government may therefore focus on this preoccupation of Wafaq to offer it the blandishment of more property in Islamabad, either that abandoned by the Lal Masjid clerics or new “alternative allotment”. The Wafaq has already laid claim to most of the property under the Lal Masjid complex. Its strength is that it can mobilise mass protest from Peshawar to Karachi at will.

In this context, the challenge from Waziristan will inevitably form the most effective plank of the “agitation” in the offing. Included in this is the Taliban warlord, Baitullah Mehsud, of South Waziristan whose alignment with Al Qaeda is well known. Writes a former chief secretary of the NWFP: “It is widely believed that the killing of the Peshawar police chief along with fourteen other police officers was the work of an Uzbek suicide bomber who came from Baitullah’s group and had links with an Egyptian Arab, Abu Nasir, who leads the Uzbeks in South Waziristan”. Thus it is quite clear that Qazi Hussain Ahmad is trying to put Maulana Fazlur Rehman on the back foot in regard to Waziristan.

It is the JUI which politically dominates in Waziristan. Since the government is reluctant to extend the Political Parties Act to the tribal areas, the JUI is the only party allowed to operate, winning almost all the “non-Party” legislative seats from Waziristan. Any radicalisation on the ground will put Fazlur Rehman on the defensive and might ultimately force him to accept the stewardship of Qazi Hussain Ahmad whose own party has its chain of madrassas, including scores in Islamabad itself. The political parties may then respond in a variety of ways. The PMLN will support and be a happy kibitzer; the PPP will stay away. The MQM, once again called upon to act, will be in a tight spot to decide. The ruling PMLQ will face its toughest challenge yet, because it is vulnerable to the appeal of the cleric. Bad days lie ahead.

The End


Authors Website: http//:voiceforpeace.8m.com

Authors Bio: My name is Muhammad Khurshid, a bonafide resident of Bajaur Agency, situated on Pak-Afghan border. Basically I am a journalist, but nowadays I have been working for peace in Bajaur Agency Tribal Areas. During my three years struggle I have conveyed a message to the people that they should abandon terrorism and work for peace. Now the tribal people have decided to extend a helping hand to the civilised world in war against terrorism, but in return they demand of the world to provide them opportunity of education. Education is the only mean of defeating terrorism.



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DAILY TIMES
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C07%5C17%5Cstory_17-7-2007_pg3_1

Editorial: Waziristan: all bets are off!

In the aftermath of the Lal Masjid operation, the Taliban militants in North Waziristan Agency have announced an end to the peace deal they had signed with the government last year. They have asserted that the deal committed the government to removing the army and its check-posts from the agency and compensating those affected by hostilities, but this undertaking was violated when the Taliban were attacked in a number of incidents and the check-posts were remounted.

The Taliban don’t want the army and paramilitaries in their areas. They also want the civilian administration through a political agent, the tribal elders and the levies called khasadars, to be practically wound up. They have warned khasadars and the levies personnel not to perform official duties with army and paramilitary troops, otherwise they would also be attacked. They have also announced “amnesty for pro-government tribal elders”, but warned that they should not conduct any jirgas with the government. This means a complete ouster of the writ of the state from the agency which might now become a new Islamic State like South Waziristan where Al Qaeda and foreign warriors are welcome.

The interior minister, Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, says that it was the Taliban who violated the agreement: “They violated the truce by challenging the government’s writ and attacking government installations, the army and innocent people”. The truth, however, is that the deal struck in the aftermath of the failure of a military initiative in the tribal areas was never a good idea. You can’t reach an equitable arrangement when the balance of force is in favour of the other side. In all situations, “negotiation” is undertaken when some semblance of dominance or deterrence is established with the opponent. After a reversal, it is not “negotiation” but an imposition of “terms” that actually takes place. What Pakistan accepted were terms from the Taliban, not a truce. So the seemingly stronger side has now revoked the terms at will because it thinks it can get away with it.

The seekers of revenge after the Lal Masjid operation have struck at a police recruitment centre in Dera Ismail Khan in the NWFP, killing 45 and wounding 108 through a suicide-bomber. There is no need for the government to speculate that Kabul must have done it. It is very much a Pakistani effort to switch off the campaign of the government to beef up its police force to avoid getting the army involved in situations of law and order violation. It smacks of Iraq where Al Qaeda kills the police recruits as they come in for induction to strengthen the writ of the fledgling Iraqi state. Earlier, the senior-most police officer of Peshawar city was target killed by a suicide-bomber, clearly to prevent the government from acquiring countervailing force against much better financed and equipped terrorists pretending to be Islamic soldiers.

When the Pakistan army moved into the tribal areas in 2001, it sent into eclipse the institution of the political agent which served the state well as it refused to try and “detribalise” the territorial entities called FATA. On the contrary, the status of the political agent should have been enhanced so that he could underpin the military operation with political legitimacy. His scouts should have been beefed up and better arms matching those of the Taliban should have been provided to the paramilitary force working under him. Instead, the military commanders virtually replaced him, even to the extent of granting construction contracts to the locals to buy their loyalty. The parallel weakening of the commissionerates in the provinces further debilitated the political agent. Therefore, after the army withdrew in 2006, the political agent was hardly an institution that could be dusted off the shelf and asked to assume its old responsibilities. The elders he used to mobilise to give legitimacy to the tough laws imposed through a special penal code too had either been warned off or killed by the Taliban. So there is nothing on the ground in FATA to stem the tide of chaos coming towards the settled areas of the NWFP. If the government wants to take the field against the Taliban it will have to deploy troops on a significant scale. Had it beefed up the institution of the political agent, pumping in money to enable him to employ more local youths into his administrative army than the Taliban — who pay them from Rs 1500 to 2500 today — the chips would not have been stacked in favour of the Taliban.

The Musharraf regime has its hands tied behind its back. It has no political support in the province that matters. Most improvidently, the NWFP government is more interested in opposing Islamabad than in saving itself from the onslaught from Waziristan. The chief minister, Akram Durrani, is more worried about how to match the aggressive pro-Taliban rhetoric of his Jama’at-e Islami ministers than to increase his administration’s ability to face up to forces bent upon swallowing up his government.

This reflects the state of abject intellectual poverty among our politicians.

Second Editorial: Misplaced discussion on the state

A discussion held by ARY TV on Sunday featured Pakistan’s top Barelvi scholar Mufti Munibur Rehman who claimed that the modern Muslim state had to be subordinated to religion. Unfortunately, neither the compere — too pro-cleric in his approach — nor the “secular” discussants talked about what happens existentially in a state subordinated to religion.

In such a situation, religion, finally, is not religion but a fiqh that comes to dominate the state, and other versions which don’t belong to that fiqh had better watch out. Mufti Munibur Rehman was lucky he was not at the Nishtar Park rally last year or he would have been killed by a suicide-bomber who was trained to carry out his job in a madrassa of Karachi. Mufti Sahib was once manhandled during moon-sighting by clerics belonging to the other more powerful school of thought. Of course, we are not talking of the Shia community which is designated as Muslims by the Constitution but not by some hardline Sunni sects, and we are also not talking of the non-Muslims and women of Pakistan, who can hardly live in a state subordinated to religion. In fact, in parts of the NWFP, religious vigilantes have been known to throw bombs at girls’ schools and threaten non-Muslims with death unless they are ready to embrace Islam.

The ARY discussion, coming in the wake of the Lal Masjid operation, could not have helped the cause of the state of Pakistan. *