Pakistan Sends Tribal Leaders to Salvage Truce Broken by Taliban

The government on Monday dispatched a team of tribal elders to meet with leaders of militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal region in an attempt to salvage a fragile peace deal that unraveled in the wake of last week’s siege of the Red Mosque.
The location of the meeting was in North Waziristan’s main town, Miran Shah, an intelligence official told The Associated Press.
The already fractious North-West Frontier Province tribal region was beset over the weekend by bombings and suicide attacks by militants, who have been angered by the assault on the mosque. The death toll exceeded 70, nearly as many as the government said had been killed last week in the Red Mosque standoff in the capital, Islamabad.
Taliban leaders in North Waziristan called off the peace deal over the weekend, after Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, deployed troops to several checkpoints in the region.
Under the truce, signed last September, the military had agreed to pull back to its barracks and take down checkpoints in exchange for a suspension of hostilities from the militants, who agreed to halt cross-border attacks on American and NATO troops in Afghanistan.
Government officials said they would allow tribal elders to enforce the peace deal in return for millions of dollars in financial aid. Critics said all the deak did was let the Taliban and Al Qaeda to regroup and plan attacks inside the country and across the border.
The September agreement was the latest in a series of sometimes contradictory steps taken by the Pakistani government to restore law and order in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where civilian administration has steadily eroded in recent years.
The Musharraf government has alternately tried to bludgeon, buy off and appease militants operating in the tribal areas, sometimes sacrificing Pakistani troops, and other times negotiating deals with some of the most feared militant commanders, who now appear to have rejected the agreement altogether.
A letter circulated Monday by the Taliban in North Waziristan said the peace pact had been scrapped “in the larger public interest.” It warned the tribal police not to aid military and paramilitary troops, and urged tribal elders not to cooperate with the government.
It also called on local tribesmen to refrain from harming civil servants working for public service departments like health, education and agriculture. “Anyone caught by the Taliban while causing any harm to employees of these departments would be considered thieves, and would be punished publicly,” the letter said.
The government team dispatched to salvage the peace accord was led by Maulana Syed Nek Zaman, a tribal member of Parliament, who met with various militant commanders at a seminary on Monday.
At the same time, Akram Khan Durrani, the chief minister of the North-West Frontier Province, warned at a news conference that any annulment of the peace pact would have dangerous repercussions for the country.
The scuttling of the accord comes as General Musharraf faces mounting troubles, including a backlash from militants and the religious right in the aftermath of the Red Mosque standoff, as well as months of pro-democracy protests from a wide cross-section of Pakistani citizens.
Even before its failure, the peace accord had not brought the security the government intended. American and NATO commanders in Afghanistan say the Taliban continue to use Pakistan’s tribal areas as a rear base. In early June, the United States National Security Council warned that the Taliban had regrouped and reorganized inside Pakistan. That same month, the Interior Ministry warned General Musharraf that the Taliban’s influence was increasingly spreading outside the tribal areas to other parts of the country.
What connection the Taliban or Al Qaeda may have had to the militants holed up in the Red Mosque remains unclear; what is known is that the clerics leading the mosque and its adjoining seminary had been agitating for Taliban-style rule in Pakistan.
They had also long enjoyed the support of the government. But they became an embarrassment for the Musharraf administration after they sent vice squads across the capital, most recently kidnapping several Chinese nationals who worked in an acupuncture clinic that the seminary students said was a brothel.
The eight-day siege of the mosque and its adjacent seminary for women and girls ended Wednesday after intense fighting for more than 36 hours between Pakistani special forces and the militants. The military put the death toll at 76.
Government officials have said in recent days that they suspect that the dead included foreign fighters. The government has also repeatedly said the fighters surrounded themselves with civilian hostages, but furnished no details.