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2 Pakistan in new Taliban peace
process By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - Although the emphasis shifts
almost daily, Washington's three-pronged plan to
"tame" Pakistan and Taliban and al-Qaeda militants
in the region is gathering momentum.
The
one prong is represented by former premier Benazir
Bhutto, recently returned from exile and entrusted
with presenting a hard line against militancy.
Last week's bomb attack on her homecoming parade
in Karachi, in which more that 140 people
were
killed, has temporarily placed her in the
background.
Then there is opposition
heavyweight Maulana Fazlur Rehman, whose star is
in the ascendant at present. He is the key link
with Taliban insurgents, and has already made a
breakthrough by negotiating American-sponsored
"small tribal jirgas" (councils) at which
indigenous elements of the Afghan resistance,
including the Taliban and Hezb-e-Islami
Afghanistan, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, will
discuss peace issues. (Asia Times Online broke
this development on August 24 - see Talks with the Taliban gain
ground.)
The third prong is
President General Pervez Musharraf, who, using
American largesse, will pump millions of dollars
into the tribal regions in an effort to isolate
the militancy there.
This is Washington's
three-pronged policy to mobilize the masses in the
region against militancy. The policy echoes that
of 1999-2001, when Washington tried to orchestrate
plans with Pakistan against al-Qaeda. The result
was the attacks of September 11, 2001, against the
United States. And this time too, al-Qaeda can be
expected to fight back on all fronts.
Talking to the Taliban The small
jirgas are expected to begin early next
month. Farooq Wardak, the Afghan government
representative, is minister of state for
parliamentary affairs and deputy chairman of the
Jirga Monitoring Commission. He will lead a
delegation to Islamabad at the invitation of
Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao.
This is the first time that the Taliban
have been given official representation in a
dialogue process sponsored by Washington, and this
could be the first step toward an American exit
strategy for Afghanistan.
However, Asia
Times Online investigations reveal that the more
the West hatches plans to isolate global jihadis
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the more they look for
options to retaliate against the West.
Rehman has certainly emerged as the man of
the moment. Only six months ago, when a group of
journalists asked the visiting US Assistant
Secretary of State for South and Central Asia,
Richard Boucher, whether he had met Pakistan's
leader of the paliamentary opposition (since
resigned), he replied that Pakistan is a country
of many million people and he could not meet every
"Tom, Dick and Harry".
But since then
Rehman has been "honored" with a meeting with
Boucher. Rehman is an astute politician and his
importance has grown in the past few weeks,
especially in the runup to the presidential
elections that saw Musharraf win another term,
pending approval by constitutional authorities,
and the attack on Bhutto.
"I can safely
predict he will be the most important person in
any future setup," commented Sheikh Rashid Ahmed,
the federal minister of railways who was
previously Pakistan's information minister and who
is considered a part of Musharraf's inner
"kitchen" cabinet.
In recent days, Rehman
has spoken to top Taliban commanders, including
Mullah Bredar in Quetta, and succeeded in
obtaining tacit approval for a ceasefire, pending
the Americans announcing a process for withdrawal
from Afghanistan.
Rehman guaranteed that
once the Taliban agreed to be a part of the
dialogue process through the small jirgas,
the US would gradually unfold its withdrawal
plans.
Both parties agreed to take steps
for peace and reciprocate each other's efforts.
The Taliban were assured by Rehman that their
participation in the jirgas would be a
milestone in which their resistance would be
accepted as legitimate.
After the initial
jirgas, in which some political settlement
would be agreed on, a grand jirga will be
convened at which the Afghan nation will press its
demands for a national Islamic government and the
withdrawal of foreign troops. The Taliban agreed
to this schedule. This year, a grand jirga
representing hundreds of key figures from Pakistan
and Afghanistan was held in Kabul, but the Taliban
were excluded, so it achieved nothing concrete.
In the last week of September, US
ambassador to Pakistan Anne W Patterson visited
Rehman, after which Rehman publicly announced that
the US was ready to plan for an exit strategy from
Afghanistan once a proper mechanism was in place.
Not so fast Al-Qaeda ideologues
have been watching developments closely, and are
working on a counter strategy. The first part of
this is to groom a Taliban leadership that will be
inflexible on the issue of resistance.
For
instance, Sirajuddin Haqqani has emerged as a
caliph within the Taliban movement. He is the son
of the veteran Afghan resistance figure Jalaluddin
Haqqani, and the Western alliance considers him
the most powerful commander in Afghanistan. (For
an interview with Sirajuddin Haqqani, see Through the eyes of the
Taliban Asia Times Online, May 5,
2004.)
Importantly, Sirajuddin's
constituency is not the Afghan Taliban but
Pakistani jihadis and Arab fighters who will not
compromise on their goal of complete victory for
al-Qaeda and the Taliban in
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