Pakistan, tribal elders strike deal
The government will end an offensive in the northwest and the tribes will ensure peace.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Tribal elders and Pakistani authorities struck a deal yesterday aimed at bringing peace to an extremist-infested northwest region where a paramilitary offensive has tried to flush out insurgents, representatives said.
The agreement in the Khyber tribal area was the latest manifestation of the new Pakistani government's preferred, and much-criticized, approach to ending extremism: negotiations. A top official warned, however, that ending the offensive depended on tribes meeting the conditions.
The tribal elders involved in the talks were effectively mediating for Mangal Bagh, a top extremist leader targeted in the paramilitary offensive. Elders have historically had significant influence in Pakistan's tribal regions, where central government authority is relatively weak.
Shaukat Khan, a tribal leader and spokesman, said the government had agreed to end the offensive in exchange for the tribes' ensuring peace in the Bara area, where the operation has focused. Elders pledged that extremists would stop threatening the nearby city of Peshawar, a key northwest hub, and stop attacking government installations, officials and forces, Khan said.
The government will lift the curfew imposed in Bara and release prisoners taken during the offensive, which was launched in late June, Khan said.
Tariq Hayat, chief administrator for Khyber tribal region, confirmed only the vague outlines of the agreement. He would not say when the paramilitary operation, which was halted amid the talks, would officially end.
Pakistan launched the offensive after extremists began threatening Peshawar as well as a key road used to send supplies to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The operation has largely targeted Lashkar-e-Islam, the group headed by Bagh, and a rival group, Ansarul Islam, both of which are accused of trying to impose their own Taliban-style Islamic rule in Khyber.
Hayat said the government told the tribal leaders that it had some "reservations" about Bagh. He said the "elders assured the government that they will take care of those reservations." He declined to say what those reservations were.
Separately, about 700 army troops were sent to a separate northwest region yesterday to end a siege of a police station by extremists demanding the release of fellow fighters, said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the army's top spokesman. About 200 militants were reported to have surrounded the station in Doaba, 45 miles southwest of Peshawar. Troops were sent in to "neutralize" the situation, Abbas said.
Cross-Border Raids Increase
Mortar and rocket
attacks by extremists in Pakistan across the border into Afghanistan have spiked
in the last month, and U.S. and NATO forces have been returning fire, the new NATO commander
in Afghanistan said.
The commander,
U.S. Gen. David D. McKiernan, did not provide figures but said that "there definitely has been an increase
[in cross-border attacks] since I've been here in the last 30 days."
In one incident,
Pakistan said a June 10 U.S. air strike killed 11 of its troops. The United States says it was firing on anti-coalition forces that had attacked on the Afghan side of the border, then fled to Pakistan.
McKiernan believes
attacks have risen in Afghanistan because extremist groups have been free to operate in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas and to cross the Afghanistan-Pakistan border unimpeded to resupply and recruit.
U.S. commanders
have criticized peace deals
the Pakistan government has made with some groups in its tribal areas, saying that violence has spiked 40 percent this
year in eastern Afghanistan, in part because of those accords.
- Associated Press
