Pakistan News and Discussion-8

[Naresh]

[center]<b><span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Pakistan and Afghanistan</span>

A border war

Pervez Musharraf and Hamid Karzai bicker in America</b>[/center]

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THE food was good, but not the mood. On September 27th General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's leader, and Hamid Karzai, his Afghan counterpart, met for dinner with George Bush in Washington. This feast, of soup and sea bass, followed weeks of feuding between the two neighbours, both key American allies in the war on terror. Afghanistan, and the western NATO powers trying to pacify it, accuse Pakistan of succouring, or at least suffering, the Taliban who have found refuge in its northern tribal areas. Mr Karzai accuses General Musharraf of “keeping and training snakes”. The general says Mr Karzai's weakness underlies the Taliban's strength. Before the dinner, which appeared to do nothing to ease the troubles, General Musharraf said smilingly: “Mr Karzai is the best man for Kabul,” then added, “but he doesn't understand Afghanistan.”

The dispute has fixed on a deal agreed on September 5th between General Musharraf and, it is alleged, the Taliban to keep the peace in Pakistan's tribal region. He says the deal was with 45 “tribal elders” in the border area of North Waziristan, and stipulated that local al-Qaeda fighters must be expelled and that the Taliban must not rule the place or do violence across the border. In return, he promised the locals that troops in the area would ease border checkpoints, in effect granting the tribes licence to smuggle. The government would also release dozens of militants—and provide lots of cash. Pakistan has said it will not withdraw its troops from the border, and may again attack the militants lurking there. But on the day General Musharraf met Mr Karzai in Washington, the Taliban was reported to have opened two offices in Miran Shah, capital of North Waziristan. An American official in Kabul also leaked the news that Taliban attacks in southern Afghanistan have increased threefold since Pakistan's deal with the tribes.

This has put General Musharraf on a sticky wicket with America too. But, at least in public, Mr Bush said he was content that the general was doing his best to quell the Talibs. Indeed, the pact with the elders, if that is what they were, followed the failure of an American-sponsored effort to control the region by force. During America's 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters, likely including Osama bin Laden, and thousands of Taliban, crossed the border into the semi-autonomous tribal area. So General Musharraf, for the first time in Pakistan's history, sent his army in. For two years, it has taken a beating. Several hundred soldiers have been killed; the local, always fragile, civil administration has been practically dismantled; and the militants' ability to skip across the border has been undiminished. Indeed, laden with Afghan drug money, they have grown stronger, igniting a war with British and Canadian NATO troops in southern Afghanistan.

<b><span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>If General Musharraf's peace deal with the tribes was an admission of his army's defeat, he will not own to it. He calls it a breakthrough in the campaign against the Taliban, and a possible template for peacemaking in Afghanistan. In Kabul earlier this month, he told Mr Karzai that he would help him to “crush the Taliban who are more evil than even al-Qaeda”. On his return home, a little provocatively, he then stated that there were no Taliban operating in Pakistan.

This has annoyed Mr Karzai. Like most Afghans, he resents Pakistan for having sponsored the Taliban while they ruled his country, and thinks it supports them still. Before the frosty dinner in Washington, he told a think-tank crowd that he and General Musharraf “both knew that Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden were in Pakistan for sure”.</span></b>

He, and perhaps Mr Bush, are not the only ones losing patience with Pakistan's military ruler. Indeed, with the notable exception of the American publisher of his memoir, “In the Line of Fire”, which was launched on September 26th, he is fast losing friends. Indians are bristling at the book's treatment of their former prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and current prime minister, Manmohan Singh, who are portrayed as sincere but weak. General Musharraf, incorrectly, taunts India for losing a war with Pakistan at Kargil in 1999. In Pakistan, powerful mullahs, and many others, accuse him of cowardice for bowing to America's demands after the 9/11 attacks—he says that Richard Armitage, the then deputy secretary of state, threatened to “bomb Pakistan into the stone age”.

<b>In Britain, meanwhile, an official, intelligence-based report described Pakistan as on the verge of chaos. It accused the powerful spying agency, ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), which brokered the deal in North Waziristan, of indirectly supporting terrorists.</b>

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