Pakistan has accepted short-term defeat and risked the wrath of its US allies for long-term strategic gains by giving in to militant tribesmen backing al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, an analyst said yesterday.
"It is a tactical retreat," retired army general Talat Masood said of the amnesty granted to five hardcore tribal fighters who have been supporting up to 600 mainly Chechen and Uzbek fighters linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
PHOTO: AP
"The Pakistani authorities did not want military confrontation because they would not be achieving their political objectives: to open up the tribal areas, make it more transparent and establish the writ of the state," he said.
"For that you need the cooperation of the tribes there, and you also want continuous access so that it doesn't turn again into a sanctuary for terrorists or narcotics peddlars," he said.
The amnesties were granted by Pakistan's military in an elaborate ceremony in a remote village in Pakistan's semi-autonomous northwest tribal region on the border with Afghanistan on Saturday.
The tribesmen, led by Nek Mohammad, a former Taliban commander from a hardcore Pashtun subtribe, had been the target of army offensives including a disastrous 12-day operation last month. They have topped a government wanted list since January.
Many of the foreign fighters they have been sheltering are believed to have been slipping across the border to kill US and Afghan targets in Afghanistan over the past year.
Under the agreement between the rebel tribesmen and Pakistani authorities, they will be allowed to stay in the region if they sign pledges to lay down their arms and cease armed activities.
Masood said that bringing the tribesmen on side was critical to redressing what has been the Pakistani army's Achilles' heel: lack of human intelligence.
"The most important thing is establishing human intelligence," he said. "The objective is to ... ensure that the tribes are unable to indulge in activities against the interests of the state and to bring them closer to mainstream politics, integrate them with the rest of the country."
US forces in Afghanistan, who have been trying to seal the border against militants infiltrating from Pakistani sanctuaries to attack aid workers, troops and government targets, are "livid" at the deal, according to Western diplomats.
"These Chechens and Uzbeks are not innocent farmers left over from the mujahidin wars [against Afghanistan's Soviet occupiers in the 1980s] who've got stranded in the region and married local girls," an Islamabad-based diplomat said.
"They've been running over the border killing people. Nek Mohammad and his men have been supplying them arms, giving them sanctuary. Nek Mohammad is probably indirectly responsible for hundreds of deaths in Afghanistan," the diplomat said.
Masood said the US military was likely to be "uncertain" about the deal.
"Because they would not know as to how it would ultimately figure out, but from a Pakistani perspective I think it has been a good agreement," he said.
Pakistani forces had probably learnt from the failures of the US military's "guns blazing" approach in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I think they would have been inspired by the US approach to the operation in both Afghanistan and Iraq," Masood said. "I think they are trying to now use the political instrument for achieving their goals rather than using the military as the centerpiece."
Masood said a key difference between the US and the Pakistani military's approaches was that the Pakistanis were operating on home turf.
"Pakistan is operating in its own territory, whereas the US [is] operating in someone else's territory, so they [can't] use the same approach," he said.
Pakistan's largest-ever offensive against al-Qaeda-linked fighters last month failed to capture any significant militant leaders but resulted in the deaths of at least 46 troops, 15 civilians and 63 militants.
Scores of homes were also destroyed, and anti-military resentment spread among the 4 million tribesmen who live in the seven fiercely independent tribal districts hugging the border.
"The military operation was a failure. But they're turning that military setback into something at least politically acceptable," Masood said.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS