SPY EYES

Three negotiators returned to the headquarters of North Waziristan on Sunday evening after holding consultations with a shura of the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on their negotiations with the government.

According to sources, Prof Muhammad Ibrahim, Maulana Yousaf Shah and Maulana Haseeb, who had arrived here from Peshawar on Saturday by a helicopter, held consultations with members of the TTP’s political shura at an undisclosed place in Shawal area of South Waziristan.

The sources said the shura headed by Qari Shakeel had demanded withdrawal of troops from the tribal areas and release of prisoners. “We don’t have complete details of the Taliban’s demands, except these two,” an official said.

After overnight stay in Miramshah, the negotiators will leave for Peshawar on Monday by a military helicopter.

The talks were held in a Taliban-controlled area.

Officials of the administration had been waiting at a checkpost since 10am to receive the Taliban’s negotiators who had gone on Saturday to seek advice from the TTP leaders about the dialogue with the government. They stayed with the Taliban overnight.

A military helicopter was ready at a helipad to take the negotiators back to Peshawar.

Taliban had received them at a checkpost near Civil Colony from where they were driven to an unspecified place.

The Taliban have three councils — political, supreme and Ulema’s. The plan for negotiations will be discussed by all the three shuras and the final decision, the sources said, would be taken by Ulema.

Meanwhile, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan is reported to have telephoned the TTP negotiators’ chief Maulana Samiul Haq and asked him why his representatives’ return had been delayed.

According to the sources, Maulana Sami informed the minister that the delegation had to frequently change its location because of drones hovering overhead.

The Maulana said that if the dialogue process was sabotaged from outside it would be tantamount to enmity towards Pakistan.

Local people said drones were continuously hovering over the region.

Reports of television channels quoted unnamed sources as saying the Taliban Shura prepared a draft containing 15 demands.

The demands are: 1) stop drone attacks; 2) introduce Sharia law in courts; 3) introduce Islamic

system of education in public and private institutions; 4) release Pakistani and foreign Taliban prisoners; 5) restore property damaged by drone attacks and pay compensation; 6) hand over control of tribal areas to local forces; 7) withdraw army from tribal areas and close down checkposts; 8) drop all criminal charges against the Taliban; 9) release prisoners from both sides; 10) grant equal rights for all — poor and rich; 11) offer jobs to families of drone attack victims; 12) end interest-based system; 13) end support for the US ‘war on terror’; 14) replace the democratic system of governance with Islamic system; and, 15) end all relations with the US.

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With any other two countries, such a sequence of events might have been followed by an official nod to the cooperation involved — or at the very least, meaningful silence. But with the United States and Pakistan it’s always more complicated. Hours after the drone strike, Pakistan’s interior minister accused the United States of the “murder of peace efforts.” He later berated “enemies dressed as friends.”

It’s an old script. Regardless of whatever cooperation is involved, both countries always find it more useful to paint the other as the villain. The Pakistani government, which in reality is playing a central role in the war on terror, gets to paint itself as the victim of a bullying superpower.

Meanwhile, American officials keep pointing to Pakistan’s “double game” for most of their failures in Afghanistan, while downplaying the fact that, without Pakistan, this war would have been impossible to wage in the first place.

The real root of the dysfunction is not so much deceit between allies as the lies both governments have told their own people. Pakistani and American leaders have systematically and purposefully misled their own publics about the nature and details of their partnership. Each country has used the other as a strategic and convenient punching bag.

As an American born to Pakistani parents, fluent in the languages of both countries, I have spent the past 12 years regularly shuttling between the two countries and I’ve seen and heard the duplicitous official narratives steadily take root on each side.

Just days after 9/11, Pervez Musharraf, the former military ruler of Pakistan, addressed his country in Urdu, telling them that America had asked Pakistan for cooperation in intelligence sharing, the use of Pakistani airspace and logistical support. Mr. Musharraf made it clear that he’d decided to cooperate.

But that’s where the openness ended. In 2005, for example, when the Pakistani government announced that a senior Al Qaeda operative had died in an accidental bomb-making explosion in Pakistan’s tribal areas, Hayatullah Khan, a Pakistani investigative journalist travelled to the scene of the blast and found fragments of an American Hellfire missile. Mr. Khan was kidnapped and soon turned up dead. Presenting evidence that America could operate in Pakistani airspace turned out to be deadly.

Seven years later, the American public still doesn’t know much about what their country does in Pakistan. For years, Washington didn’t even recognize the use of drones there. Only recently, after leaks from inside the Obama administration forced officials to begin speaking about the details of the program, have Americans been able to piece together a basic outline.

The same is true of supply lines into landlocked Afghanistan. Within months of the 2001 invasion, Mr. Musharraf signed a deal allowing the transport of American and NATO military equipment through Pakistan. But the agreement was kept secret from the Pakistani people until 2010. The American government was no more candid with its own people. Americans never truly appreciated, for example, that since President George W. Bush was denied permission to dock U.S. Navy vessels in Pakistani ports, America was forced to outsource nearly the entire American military supply chain into the hands of private contractors close to the Pakistani military.

The decision to hide and obscure such details was born of a desire to control the precarious narrative of the war at home. Insecure Pakistani leaders always feared that details of the cooperation would destabilize their already shaky regimes. Likewise, Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama likely thought that publicly acknowledging the compromises they’d made to win Pakistan’s support, might make them appear weak. Keeping their citizens in the dark, leaders in both nations seemed to think, would keep the cooperation simple.

The result has been quite the opposite. The stark disconnect between reality and rhetoric now makes both governments’ pronouncements sound absurd. There have been more than 300 American drone strikes in a remote corner of Pakistan. And while Islamabad continues to denounce these strikes, Pakistani citizens see thousands of trucks carrying huge shipping containers on the highways every day, bringing supplies to the American military in Afghanistan. Likewise, Americans have learned that billions of dollars in aid is still flowing to Pakistan, despite the fact that Osama bin Laden was living a mile away from Pakistan’s main military academy for years.

The resulting confusion is making Americans and Pakistanis hate each other. A Pew Research Center poll in July found that America is more disliked in Pakistan than anywhere else. A Gallup poll a few months earlier found that the countries most disliked by Americans are Pakistan, Iran and North Korea.

The lies that were meant to hold Pakistan and America together in a time of war, are now imperiling the alliance they were meant to protect.

The two countries have been geopolitical allies since Pakistan appeared on the map in 1947. In the interest of preserving this long-term relationship, which will remain vital to both countries long after the American troops withdraw from Afghanistan, the details of the agreements between Pakistan and America must be made public. In the end, Americans and Pakistanis want the same thing — the truth, for once, from their leaders.

Shahan Mufti is the author of “The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family, and War.”

INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES

Courtesy: The New York Times.

THE death of a man who waged war against the Pakistani state and was responsible for the slaughtering of thousands of innocent men, women and children should have come as a great relief to this strife-torn nation.

Instead, our political leaders are mourning the death of Hakeemullah Mehsud in a US drone strike describing the incident as an “attack on peace”.

From being public enemy No.1, the chief of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has virtually been turned into a hero after his inglorious death. A mass murderer who ordered the beheading of our soldiers and claimed responsibility for killing a Pakistani general just a few months ago, is now being elevated to the status of a martyr.

Instead of seizing this moment of opportunity to dismantle a fragmented terrorist network, a frightened political leadership has shamelessly prostrated itself before the militants. As a result, the extremists and their allies are now dominating the public narrative despite their crimes against the people of Pakistan. It is an extremely dangerous situation for a country facing the existential threat of spiralling violent extremism. A narrow self-serving leadership is taking the entire country towards a suicidal path.

With few exceptions, all political parties have joined the chorus that the fatal drone strike on Hakeemullah was a conspiracy to scuttle an illusory peace process. While the interior minister has called for reviewing relations with the US, an agitated Imran Khan has threatened to block the Nato supply line in protest. The bravado may just be public posturing, but the irresponsible rhetoric could lead to some unintentional consequences, plunging the country into more dire straits.

It is a pity that even the killing of young women and children in a suicide bombing in a crowded Peshawar bazaar or the massacre of Christian worshippers in the church bombing has not shaken the great Khan as much as the death of the leader of the militant outfit that perpetrated those heinous attacks. He even refuses to accept that the Taliban were behind those bombings despite their endorsement of the attack.

Seemingly, all the tumult is about the timing of the US action and the violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty once again. According to the interior minister, the attack was carried out hours before a three-member delegation was to meet the TTP leadership and extend to them a formal invitation from the government for talks.

Notwithstanding the questionable legality of America’s drone strikes on Pakistani soil, it is hard to believe that the targeting of the TTP chief was part of a plan to sabotage the talks as alleged by our political leaders.

One should not forget that the TTP leader was on the US’s most wanted list with a bounty of up to $5m on his head. He came on the US radar after a video showed him talking to Hummam Khalil Abu-Mulal al Balawi, a Jordanian doctor with Al Qaeda connections who blew himself up inside a CIA operating base in Afghanistan’s Khost province, killing seven intelligence operatives in 2009. The incident also confirmed his close ties with Al Qaeda.

Soon after, Hakeemullah claimed to have trained Faisal Shehzad, an American of Pakistani origin who was involved in a failed attempt to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square.

Hakeemullah had narrowly escaped several drone strikes in the past three years. He was also reportedly injured in one of them that kept him out of action for several months. Significantly, the fatal attack on Friday came a couple of weeks after the US forces had snatched from the Afghan intelligence agencies Latif Mehsud, a close confidant of the TTP leader.

It is quite plausible that the information gleaned from Latif might have led the CIA to Hakeemullah’s hideout. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has confirmed that American officials had informed him that the TTP leader would not be spared if tracked down.

For sure, the drone campaign has remained a major irritant in the troubled relations between Islamabad and Washington. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also raised the issue during his meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington last month. Indeed, Pakistan’s objection to the violation of the country’s sovereignty is fully justified on legal and ethical grounds. There are no two views about the negative political impact of the collateral damage caused by the drone attacks.

But it is also a fact, that the drones have eliminated many high-value Pakistani militants running their terrorist operations from North Waziristan. Prominent among those killed in the last two years are Waliur Rehman, who was deputy chief of the TTP, Ilyas Kashmiri, Qari Hussain, Qari Zafar and Badar Mansoor. They were all masterminds of attacks on Pakistani security installations.

Pakistan has also decided to contact the five permanent members of the UN Security Council on the killing of Hakeemullah in the latest drone strike. The move will certainly make Pakistan a laughing stock and only weaken the country’s case on the drone issue.

Leave aside other countries, Islamabad cannot even convince its closest ally China on the matter. The militant sanctuaries in North Waziristan are a cause for concern to the entire international community. It is certain that the way Pakistan is dealing with the issue of terrorism will find no takers.

It was questionable from the outset whether the government’s peace efforts could succeed given the uncompromising attitude of the TTP. In his last interview to the BBC, Hakeemullah had rejected any dialogue under the Pakistani Constitution, saying that it envisioned a secular democratic system.

Now with his death that may lead to further fragmentation of the TTP, the possibility of any purposeful negotiations has become even more remote. But the danger is that the current state of policy disarray may provide a conducive environment in which the militants can revitalise their activities. It is perhaps, the most critical point in the country’s struggle against the rising militant threat.

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