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October 19, 2006

Pakistan: Muslim Clerics Ordering Taliban Fighters Into Afghanistan

On September 5 an "accord" took place between the Pakistani government and the Taliban who control most of the borderlands of North and South Waziristan in North-West Frontier Province. The deal signed by Taliban leaders and Pakistan government representatives included the clause: "There shall be no cross-border movement for militant activity in neighbouring Afghanistan."

In exchange for signing the deal, 45 Taliban members who had helped to broker the deal were paid 100,000 rupees apiece ($1,658), and the government promised the Taliban 10 million rupees ($165,838) if it did not return to them vehicles and weaponry it had seized during military operations.

Within days of the deal being signed, it was being broken. The three-page agreement included the clause "There will be no target killing", but bodies of people executed by the Taliban as "US spies" began to turn up.

Pakistan wanted to reduce its troop deployment from the border region. Apparently 80,000 troops have been stationed on the border, and these were needed in Balochistan province, where a new insurgency was forming.

The politicians who had come up with the idea were the Islamists in the Regional Assembly of North-West Frontier Province. The provincial government is made up almost entirely of members of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal or MMA. This is an alliance of six Islamist parties, who constitute the opposition to the government.

The leader of the MMA is the cleric Qazi Hussain Ahmed, who is also leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, which wishes to see Pakistan entirely ruled by sharia law. He promised last year to mount a revolution, and organised many of the anti-cartoon riots in February, which became violent calls for the overthrow of the government.

It should have been obvious to anyone with any intelligence that a deal supported by the MMA and the Taliban would work only in the interests of Muslim extremism, and would not benefit either the government of Afghanistan, Pakistan nor its allies in the "war on terror". Analysts expressed their concerns when the "accord" was made and today, their fears appear to have been validated.

Agence France Presse in Yahoo News reports that captured Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan have confessed to coming from Pakistan, and they claim that they were sent to fight "Jihad" against British forces there on the orders of Muslim clerics.

Three young Taliban fighters were captured after their group's attempt to ambush a platoon of Afghanistan soldiers in Barmal district of Paktika province went awry. 32 Taliban attacked a patrol but were met with fierce gunfire. The Afghanistan troops called in reinforcements, and within five hours, all of the Taliban fighters, save three, were dead or had fled. The fire-fight took place close to the Afghan/Pakistani border.

The 24 dead were mostly Afghan Taliban, but also included an Arab, Chechens, Pakistanis, Turks, and a man from Yemen. The three survivors included an Afghan and two Pakistanis. Some of those not killed by Afghan forces blew themselves up with grenades rather than be captured.

One of the Pakistanis, a youth called Alahuddin, said: "Mullahs in Pakistan were preaching to us that we are obliged to fight jihad in Afghanistan because there are foreign troops -- there is an Angriz (British) invasion. A Pakistani Taliban commander, Saifullah, introduced us to a guide who escorted us to Barmal. Then he left and we joined a group already here and came to the ambush site."

He had only been in Afghanistan for two days before he became captured. he said: "We were sent to Afghanistan blindly. We call on our other friends in Pakistan and say, 'There is no jihad here, everybody is Muslim'."

Alahuddin had come from Miranshah, the regional capital of North Waziristan, as had Zahidullah, the other captured Pakistani. He claimed a mullah had brought him into the conflict and had introduced him to the Taliban.

Zahidullah said: "We came to Afghanistan to carry out jihad against British forces -- as Muslims we are obliged to do jihad against them, this is what we were told."

Striking deals with one's enemies and then allowing them the responsibility of policing the borderlands is an unwise action, yet this is exactly what the weak Pakistani government has done. The signs have been coming for years that an insurgency was brewing on the tribal regions of North-West Frontier Province. Waziristan has been the home of both al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban refugees since the fall of Mullah Omar's "administration". Pakistani troops have been placed in the region for at least three years.

In March, Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, told the National Assembly in Islamabad that from the beginning of this year (a mere nine weeks), more than 120 pro-government tribal elders had been killed by Islamist (Taliban and Al-Qaeda) militants in Waziristan.

At the start of March, Miranshah was taken over by Islamists and was only retaken after a sustained battle which cost hundreds of lives. In Wana, regional capital of South Waziristan, the first sharia courts operated by the Pakistani Taliban came into existence. On March 26, they carried out their first execution.

On December 1 the third in commander of al Qaeda - Abu Hamza Rabia - was killed in a rocket attack in Haisori village near Miranshah. A US strike on Damidola, four miles within the Pakistan border, on January 13, killed Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, aka Abu Khabab al-Masri, a senior al-Qaeda explosives and poisons trainer.

The Pakistani Taliban are no different from the Afghanistan Taliban, and they have harbored al Qaeda members, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of al Qaeda, as the Afghanistan Taliban did when they controlled Afghanistan. Zawahiri was the target of the Damidola strike, but had only cancelled an engagement in the village at the last moment.

The Pakistan government is more concerned about staying in power than really combatting terrorism. By allowing the MMA to be involved in "deals" with the Taliban it has only increased the likelihood of bloodshed continuing in Afghanistan.

Qazi Hussein Ahmed, head of MMA, is no friend of democracy. He was behind the sabotaging of attempts to amend the Hudood laws which discriminate against women and non-Muslims. According to Aftenposten from 2004: "Qazi Hussain Ahmed has earlier made flattering comments about Osama bin Laden, and his party, Jamaat-e-Islami, also has hailed al-Qaeda members as heroes. The party also has allegedly encouraged its members to shield al-Qaeda members who are fleeing US troops in Afghanistan. Because of this, both Belgium and the Netherlands blocked his entry as late as May of this year."

He runs a madrassa where thousands of fighters were sent to Afghanistan to join the Taliban when they came to power.

It seems that other Muslim clerics are now doing the same. The Afghan and coalition security forces have said that since the "accord" was brokered between the MMA and the Taliban, there has been a 300% increase in incidents inside the Afghanistan border. General Murad Ali, deputy commander of the southeastern military corps accused the Pakistan military.

He said: "The cooperation of Pakistan with Taliban and Al-Qaeda is visible. They cross into Afghanistan even in areas where Pakistani posts are installed, but they are not prevented. They carry out attacks and then return."

AFP reports that Samina Ahmed of the International Crisis Group has this week called the accord between Pakistan and its Taliban as "irresponsible to say the least".

Only a naive optimist like Kim Howells, Britain's Minister of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs could view the Taliban accord as something positive. He said on September 9, four days after the deal was signed, that the peace deal could serve as a model for Afghanistan. "One wonders if it could be applied to the other side of the Afghan border," he mused.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at October 19, 2006 11:02 AM

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