Descent into Appeasement

Pakistan’s dangerous deals with terrorists.

Global Geopolitics Net – Global Intel Net

Friday, June 06, 2008

(C) Copyright 2008 Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Bill Roggio. All rights reserved.

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Bill Roggio

This article is being republished with permission. It appears in The Weekly Standard 06/09/2008, Volume 013, Issue 37

The good news is that some politicians apparently do keep their promises. Immediately after being appointed Pakistan’s prime minister earlier this year, Yousaf Raza Gilani promised negotiations with the Taliban, saying that his government was “ready to talk to all those who give up arms and adopt the path of peace.” Regional officials echoed his sentiment. He has delivered. The bad news is that such negotiations are eroding Pakistan’s security and creating an increasingly dangerous situation for Americans.

The trouncing of Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s PML-Q party in the country’s February elections signaled a repudiation of his internal policies and his alliance with the United States. Musharraf’s approach to Pakistan’s largely lawless tribal regions–havens for the Taliban and al Qaeda–swung clumsily erratically between mobilizing his forces and entering into unenforceable agreements that eroded his military credibility. Neither tactic did much good, but negotiating with terrorists was the more popular of the two failed policies.

It is not surprising then that Pakistan’s new government launched a round of negotiations with the country’s Islamic extremists. What was unexpected, though, was the scale of the negotiations. Talks have been opened and agreements entered with virtually every militant outfit in the country. But the government has done nothing to answer the problem of the past accords and is again accepting promises that it has no means of enforcing.

The Taliban violated each of the conditions of the now-infamous September 2006 Waziristan accords. It used the ceasefire as an opportunity to erect a parallel system of government complete with sharia courts, taxation, recruiting offices, and its own police force. Al Qaeda in turn benefited from the Taliban’s expansion, building what U.S. intelligence estimates as 29 training camps in North and South Waziristan alone. And, while even the Waziristan accords paid lip service to stopping cross-border attacks against Coalition forces in Afghanistan, the new negotiations often leave this consideration aside. As North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) governor Owari Ghani recently told the New York Times, “Pakistan will take care of its own problems, you take care of Afghanistan on your side.”

The first in this new round of agreements was struck with the NWFP’s Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (the TNSM or Movement for the Implementation of Mohammad’s Sharia Law) on April 20 in the Malakand Division. The TNSM is led by Maulana Sufi Mohammed, who was imprisoned in 2002 for providing fighters to the Taliban in Afghanistan (as the TNSM continues to do to this day). The Pakistani government and the TNSM entered into a six-point deal in which the TNSM renounced attacks on Pakistan’s government in exchange for the promise that sharia law would be imposed in Malakand. The government also freed Sufi Mohammed.

A month later, Pakistan inked a deal with the Taliban in the Swat district. Led by Mullah Fazlullah (Sufi Mohammed’s son-in-law), they have been waging a brutal insurgency in the once-peaceful vacation spot. (More than 200 Pakistani soldiers and police have been killed since January 2007.) The 15-point agreement between the Pakistani government and the Swat Taliban stipulates that the military will withdraw its forces, and the government will allow the imposition of sharia law, permit Fazlullah to broadcast on his radio channel–which was previously banned–and help turn Fazlullah’s madrassa into an “Islamic University.”

Though the government extracted some concessions from the Taliban, they are so difficult to enforce that Pakistan will likely gain little more than the reintroduction of vaccination programs. (Fazlullah has campaigned against vaccinations in the past, describing them as a Western plot to make Pakistani men impotent.) The promise to close down training camps is certainly suspect.

This week, Pakistan negotiated a peace agreement with a Tehrik-i-Taliban leader in the Mohmand agency. Its terms are similar to the new accords signed with the TNSM and Swat Taliban.

In South Waziristan, the Pakistani government is in the process of negotiating an agreement with Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban. He is a longtime adherent of the Taliban’s ideology, frequently visiting Afghanistan in the mid-1990s and appointed by Mullah Omar as governor of the Mehsud tribe. Baitullah Mehsud’s forces are responsible for killing and kidnapping hundreds of Pakistani soldiers, and he has masterminded a suicide-bombing campaign throughout Pakistan. He established the Tehrik-i-Taliban in December 2007 to unite local Taliban movements throughout the tribal areas and the NWFP and is thought to be responsible for Benazir Bhutto’s assassination that month.

While the agreement has yet to be signed, Pakistan’s Daily Times published a draft copy. The draft states that the Tehrik-i-Taliban must eject foreign terrorists (a concession they have ignored in the past) and prohibits them from attacking government and military personnel or impeding the movement of aid workers. In exchange, Pakistan will free Taliban prisoners and withdraw its army from the region. The deal is to be signed any day.

Pakistan has also started negotiations with the Taliban in the settled district of Kohat. The leaked terms of the proposed agreement are nearly identical to those negotiated with other groups.

This strategy of accelerated appeasement only empowers groups with a history of violence who are devoted to undermining Pakistan’s sovereignty. In addition to creating breathing space for extremists (since it is the militants who determine when an agreement is broken), the accords allow a greater flow of recruits to the training camps and further violence. At best, the politicians are shunting the problems down the road–and these problems will be larger by the time Pakistan is forced to confront them.

The new accords are also a threat to the United States. Baitullah Mehsud has told journalists that “jihad in Afghanistan will continue” regardless of negotiations, a sentiment echoed by other Taliban leaders. As U.S. forces in Afghanistan face increased cross-border attacks, Americans at home should be concerned about the increase in the risk of another catastrophic terrorist attack. The 9/11 Commission Report warned that a terrorist organization requires “time, space, and the ability to perform competent planning and staff work” in order to carry out a 9/11-like attack. Pakistan’s new accords provide al Qaeda and its allies with the requisite time and space.

If another major act of terror hits the United States, it will almost certainly be traced back to the al Qaeda network in Pakistan. Far from addressing the situation, Pakistan’s government is only increasing the dangers that we face.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is the vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the author of My Year Inside Radical Islam. Bill Roggio, an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, analyzes military developments in Pakistan at longwarjournal.org.

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Palestinians Trapped at Crossroads

Global Geopolitics Net – Global Intel Net
June 1, 2008

© Copyright Nicola Nasser. All rights reserved.

By Nicola Nasser*

Firing home-made primitive rockets at Israeli targets from the Gaza Strip, the mass sweeping through the Palestinian – Egyptian border crossing of Rafah in January and the series of ongoing peaceful demonstrations at Gaza’s crossing points with Israel are not an aggressive demonstration of self-confidence, but more a show of defensive despair and weakness against the tight Israeli military siege, as much as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ threats to resign are passive defensive reaction to the political siege imposed on him by the United States and Israel, who so far fail to deliver on their promises to bring about an agreement to create a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.

Given the corruption investigations, which have already heralded either a premiership change or early elections that would lead to a government change in Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is likely nearing the end of his term to join Abbas and US President George W. Bush, whose terms will come to their end next January, as outgoing leaders whom all their protagonists are counting down time until their departure, before they could deliver on their promised vision of a two-state solution for the Palestinian – Israeli conflict.

Their failure is trapping the Palestinian national movement at a historical crossroads by a peace option that could not deliver, with no other alternatives, and a peace process that is meant for itself as a crisis management tactic, while a multi-layer internal division is paralyzing its central decision-making to render it incapable of being up to the challenge of breaking through the impasse.

The Palestinian national movement finds itself in a deteriorating state of paralysis. “There’s almost no Palestinian leadership,” Kadoura Fares, a former Palestinian Cabinet minister and a leading member of President Abbas’ Fatah party, told the Washington Times on May 15.

This state of affairs is old enough. On May 31 2007, former Palestinian negotiator and senior associate member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Ahmad Samih Khalidi, wrote in The Guardian: “What was once a dedicated and vibrant Palestinian national movement is today almost bereft of effective leadership.”

The emergence of Fatah al-Islam in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, “the infestation of al-Qaida-type salafism,” which has already reached Gaza Strip, according to Khalidi, and the wide-spreading attraction of the one-state or bi-national state option among the Palestinians, as an alternative for the two-state solution for the Palestinian Israeli conflict, are manifestations of the deteriorating influence of the national movement led by both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and “Hamas.”

Several interrelated and interdependent factors are sustaining the status quo:

First, the US-sponsored political process launched with much fanfare in Annapolis, Maryland on November 17 last year has almost lost steam, leaving the two-state solution doomed and the PLO disillusioned, but in a loss of what the next step should be.

The PLO is now aware that they were used by the US-Israeli allies to appease the Arab “moderates” into being tricked in their turn into closing their eyes to the US free hand in Iraq and vis-à-vis Iran and Syria. The Quartet of the Middle East peace mediators, comprising the US, UN, EU and Russia, subscribes to the same policy.

Second, Peace alternatives, like the one-state solution, have slim chances to find Israeli subscribers and are already ruled out by the US-Israeli determination to impose the recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” on Palestinians as a precondition for making peace.

Third, Both Amman and Cairo as well as a Palestinian semi-consensus decisively rule out an old Israeli alternative to annex the West Bank to Jordan (the so-called Jordanian option) and Gaza Strip to Egypt. “Jordanians consider the mere talk on this … a conspiracy against them,” former minister of information and member of the upper house of parliament, Saleh Qallab, wrote in Asharq al-Awsat on January 31, adding that Egypt “knows” that restoring Gaza to its pre-1967 status would be an Egyptian “time bomb.”

Forth, the peace “contacts” via Turkey between Syria and Israel is further proof of the impasse on the Palestinian – Israeli track. Marc Perelman, in The Jewish Daily Forward on May 22, quoted Aaron David Miller, who was part of American peace negotiation teams in the region for three decades, as saying: “Leaving one track and going for the other is a way for Israel to get some leverage on the Palestinian track that seems stuck.”

Fifth, the multi-layer internal division (between Hamas and Fatah, within Fatah itself, the presidency and Hamas, which dominates the Palestinian legislative Council (PLC), the governments of Ramallah and Gaza) is paralyzing Palestinian central decision-making. "Neither the peace process, nor the (upcoming) sixth Fatah conference can succeed without national reconciliation,” senior Fatah leader and former national security adviser, Jibril al-Rjoub, told Al-Arabiyya satellite television on February 17. However, national reconciliation remains hostage to US-Israeli veto and anti-Hamas preconditions.

Sixth, the crossroads is not only visible because the US sponsor of the peace process is already preoccupied with the electoral campaign that will bring about a new administration next January, but it is more visible by the internal Palestinian division.

National institutional terms of reference have almost been obsolete for years now. The last Fatah conference was held in 1989. The PLO has been practically overtaken and marginalized by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its marginalization doomed its leading role among the Palestinian Diaspora and refugees in exile, leaving a vacuum that was filled by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.

Moreover the PA institutional references are either in no better legitimacy or their legitimacy will expire by the end of the 2008. President Abbas’ term expires next January; the PLC, whose term will expire in January 2009, is paralyzed by Israeli detention of more than fifty of its lawmakers. Palestinian Central Election Commission is already bracing for local elections be the year end.

Convening the Fatah sixth conference, reviving the PLO back to its leading role, inclusion by the PLO of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other emerging non-PLO political parties, are overdue prerequisites for a “legitimate” national unity, while renewal of the PA institutional references is already on the agenda.

If the national institutional references are not revived for whatever reason, be it the US-Israeli veto or other, and the renewal of the PA institutions is adversely affected by the national division and not properly done according to the Basic Law, the ensuing inaction would not only exacerbate the divide but it would render the Palestinian people leaderless, deprive Israel of a credible Palestinian peace partner and rule out peace and any credible peace process for a long time to come; in the end this could be the real undeclared US-Israeli strategy!

* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab Journalist based in Bir Zeit of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank.

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