In border zone, Pakistan backs off from Taliban

"But what has been done in terms of local jihadi organizations, that provided networks [and] support?" asks Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director of the International Crisis Group, a think tank. "Look at London. You cannot compartmentalize these groups. They flow from one to the other. They have common goals."

While the government has been adept at plucking Al Qaeda leaders from cities, the border regions have begun to look like the old Afghanistan under Mullah Omar.

In the pine forests covering Dir, a remote area to the north of Waziristan, Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found, despite rumors of his presence.

But his spirit lives on, reverberating in explosions that increasingly rock the area, two just last week. Local militant groups, whom the police seem unable to identify, are targeting music stores and Internet cafes in the main city, deemed vestiges of Western obscenity. It is, police officials fear, a sign that extremist tendencies are spreading, spilling over from the restive tribal zone to the south.

This was a problem allegedly contained to South Waziristan, where the Taliban have instituted strict religious codes of conduct. They have also hung and decapitated criminals and suspected spies. The state is powerless to stop mob justice there because it is now, according to local journalists and officials, the only kind of justice. In the vacuum, the Taliban have also allegedly carved out the area, which borders Afghanistan, as one of several bases from which to launch attacks against NATO and coalition troops.

It was, ironically, a peace agreement – much like this week's deal – that seems to have enabled all this, say observers. In 2004, the government granted amnesty to militant leaders in South Waziristan and pulled back its troops from check posts. It was widely seen as a failure of Islamabad's military strategy, which proved bloody for both the Army and local civilians. While the government hailed the accord, the area quickly became a vacuum that the Taliban filled. Within a year, Maulana Abdul Malick, a member of the National Assembly from South Waziristan, said the area was "virtually under the control of people who were once on the government's wanted list and foreign militants are roaming around freely."

The stakes are high if North Waziristan's militants or the government default on this week's deal. The area borders on eastern provinces in Afghanistan, where NATO troops are to assume military command in coming weeks. Some fear it could become, as South Waziristan already is, another launchpad for cross-border assaults.

On Wednesday, Musharraf, meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, called the accord a symbol of his commitment to crushing the Taliban. The White House reacted by saying it is not concerned.

But many here argue that the government seems able to cut deals only with militants, but won't engage with the country's own political parties.

"It shows us that the survival interests are far greater in the imagination of the military rulers than the larger national interest for political reconciliation," says Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. The government, he says, seems unable to deal with Nawaz Sharif or Benazir Bhutto, the two former prime ministers now blocked from returning to contest elections in 2007.

Those elections provide a new chance to address the problem, analysts say, by allowing a democratic government to tackle terrorism through national consensus. "Democracies are better equipped to deal with these issues than the military," says Mr. Rais.

Others concur, pointing out that a healthy democracy would most likely avoid making deals like the one this week.

"Had there been a representative government, there wouldn't be this deal between the Talibs and the government," says Ahmed. "It would have been debated in Parliament."

Page: 1 | 2