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  • Securing the Afghan-Pakistani border

    Securing the Afghan-Pakistani border

    Afghanistan (BBC)
    Image: BBC

    Pakistan is pushing ahead with its controversial peace strategy in the tribal areas on the Afghan border, and, despite criticism in Washington, the US wants to fund it to the tune of $750 million.
    By Shaun Waterman in Washington, DC for ISN Security Watch (03/04/07)

    Last week, at a ceremony attended by hundreds of tribal leaders in the town of Khar, the largest town in the semi-autonomous Bajuar tribal agency on the Afghan border, Pakistani officials signed the third in a series of peace deals they hope to strike throughout the troubled region.

    US officials have publicly declared that the Pakistani policy of negotiating these deals has created a safe haven for al-Qaida and Taliban militants - which they are using to prepare for their annual spring offensive in neighboring Afghanistan. But the senior US State Department official responsible for the region told reporters in Islamabad in March that the Bush administration would ask Congress for US$750 million to support the peace program anyway.

    And just hours after the deal was inked, a senior official of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and three of his aides were killed in a roadside attack in Bajuar staged by men on motorcycles with grenades and automatic weapons, according to Dawn, an independent Pakistani daily.

    According to the BBC, the Bajuar deal, signed on 26 March with leaders of the Salarzai and Utmankhel tribes, committed the locals not to shelter foreign militants. Local press reports, including one carried by Pakistani daily The News, said the tribal leaders also committed not to allow “subversive” activities, and added that violators would be punished by having their homes demolished and being expelled from the region, “in line with tribal customs.”

    In return, the BBC reported tribal elder Malik Abdul Aziz as saying, “the government was now bound to tell tribal elders before launching any operation in their region.”

    “The administration will not raid our places without any solid proof and withdraw warrants of arrests issued against our people on the basis of suspicion,” Aziz said, according to The News.

    Other reports quoted him as saying that the government also agreed to expedite a large program of development aid in Bajuar - that’s where the US$750 million US aid package comes in.

    The signing follows two previous deals Pakistani authorities inked with local leaders, in North and South Waziristan, where pledges to end cross-border attacks into Afghanistan were obtained in return for the withdrawal to barracks of the Pakistani military, and their replacement at checkpoints by tribal militia.

    But it also follows a more informal deal apparently struck on 17 March with the Mohmand tribe, at a jirga - or traditional tribal council.
    The controversial heart of the peace plan

    According to Dawn, about 300 tribal leaders, including Pakistani parliamentarian and militant Islamist leader Maulana Mohammad Sadiq, attended, along with the Pakistani government’s political agent - a kind of tribune in the tribal area - Shakeel Qadir Khan.

    “The administration does not have any formal agreement with the Mamond tribe. They have only reassured us of their commitments to maintain peace in the area,” Qadir told Dawn.

    The paper went on to quote unnamed officials saying that jirga “was part of a broader agreement likely to be reached between the government and [prominent tribal leader] Maulana Faqir Mohammad,” one of the heads of an extremist group called Tehrik Nifaz-e-Shariah Muhammadi, or the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws, sometimes known by its Pakistani initials as TNSM.

    According to analyst Bill Roggio, TNSM, led by Maulana Sufi Muhammad, provided the ideological inspiration to the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s, and sent over 10,000 fighters into Afghanistan to fight the US military after they entered the country in 2001.

    The Bajuar deal was scheduled to be inked last October, but was derailed hours before the scheduled signing when a missile strike later claimed by the Pakistani military killed more than 80 people at a religious school run by Faqir, which intelligence officials said was a school for Taliban suicide bombers.

    The incident illustrated perfectly the contradiction at the heart of the Pakistani’s peace strategy - many of those they need to strike deals with are actively fighting the Afghan government and the international military forces supporting it.

    Last year, a widely quoted assessment by a US military spokesman said that cross-border attacks had tripled in the months following the signing of the North Waziristan deal last September.

    In March, even the relentlessly upbeat Richard Boucher, the senior US State Department official responsible for the region, told reporters in Islamabad that "I think everybody recognizes that at this point - and perhaps that will change - the political deal in Waziristan has not stopped the militancy. Unfortunately, it has not stopped the bombings against Pakistani civilians; it hasn't stopped the cross-border activity.”

    But Boucher nonetheless announced that the Bush administration would ask Congress for US$750 million over the next five years in development program aid for the region.

    "I think this commitment to the development of Pakistan, this commitment to a long-term relationship, is another example of the very broad and deep relationship we have and that we are developing with Pakistan," said Boucher.

    That will be harder to sell the US Congress than to a handful of reporters traveling with him to Islamabad.

    Earlier this year, the newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, told the US Senate that al-Qaida enjoyed a “secure hideout” in Pakistan.

    Lieutenant-General Douglas Lute, of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a March Senate hearing that Taliban forces “move with relative impunity and operate with relative impunity within 25 or 30 miles of the border, where in effect the reach of the Pakistani government does not extend.”

    Already efforts are afoot in Congress to condition any aid to Pakistan on progress in rooting out Taliban and al-Qaida leaders.
    Coming up with a viable alternative

    Earlier this year, Pakistani officials angrily defended their strategy and its critics have yet to come up with a viable alternative.

    "The kinetic eradication of the Taliban is not an option,” British Defence Minister Des Browne acknowledged to a House of Commons Committee on 20 March. “We want dislocation between Taliban commanders and those who would fight for them by separating Tier 1 leadership from people they would look to for support,” he said, according to a report by Jane’s Defense Weekly.

    British-led NATO forces in Afghanistan followed the Pakistani lead last year, reaching a security accord with local leaders in four northern districts of Helmand province, from which they withdrew.

    One of the problems is that a hearts and minds strategy like this one - designed to woo local leadership on both sides of a border they do not recognize away from militants, and undercut extremist support among the population with internationally funded development programs - needs two things that are in very short supply.

    Time, and good intelligence.

    Time is in short supply because of the impatient political cycle in the US, where a Democrat-led Congress may see the issue as a useful stick with which to beat an administration it sees as having bungled Afghanistan.

    But a more sinister clock is also ticking. The London airliner plot broken up last August by British police may only have been in its early stages, but it was hatched - according to prosecutors - from a base in the tribal areas while the Pakistani military were deployed there.

    “What scares some US intelligence analysts is what they might have been up to since” the military withdrew to barracks, analyst Peter Bergen told ISN Security Watch.

    The fighting in March between tribal militias and Uzbek Islamic militants near the town of Wana in South Waziristan demonstrates the importance of good intelligence.

    Pakistani authorities sought to portray the incident as the tribals keeping their end of last year’s bargain by expelling the Uzbeks, affiliated with the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan founded by Tahir Yaldashev. They said more than 200 people had died.

    But Dawn reported the incident was sparked by the Uzbeks’ killing of an Arab militant, also linked to al-Qaida and under the protection of a local Taliban militia commander, Maulvi Nazir.

    And the BBC, citing local witness accounts, reported only 50 or so casualties. With journalists barred by edict on the Pakistani side of the border, and facing huge logistical and safety obstacln es to reporting from the Afghan side, facts on the ground are going to be hard to come by.


    Shaun Waterman is a senior writer and analyst for ISN Security Watch. He is a UK journalist based in Washington, DC, covering homeland and national security for United Press International.

    ISN Security Watch - Securing the Afghan-Pakistani border
    Is it to protect the safe havens of the Talebans from the NATO or is it a sincere effort to curb terrorism?

    Also a neat way to milk the gullible and besieged kind hearted Americans!
    Last edited by Ray; 04 Apr 07,, 19:26.


    "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

    I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

    HAKUNA MATATA
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