Thu, Apr 24, 2008 page5

• FEATURE: Pakistan enjoying brief honeymoon

  CHANGING WINDS Monday’s decision by provincial authorities to free a senior pro-Taliban mullah was the first fruit of a new policy of wooing hardline Islamists

  • THE GUARDIAN, LONDON
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  Pakistan’s new leaders are doing the easy stuff first. Judges fired by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, including former chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, will probably get their jobs back soon. Curbs on the media are being lifted. Earlier this week the Supreme Court cleared the way for slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, to run for parliament in June. That, in turn, could put the Pakistan People’s Party co-chairman in line for the job of prime minister.

  All this honeymoon excitement is partly about getting back at Musharraf, whose influence is dwindling almost daily following February’s election defeat.

  A possibly more significant development was Monday’s decision by provincial authorities to free a senior pro-Taliban mullah, Sufi Muhammad.

  The move was a first, untasted fruit of Islamabad’s new policy of wooing rather than fighting hardline Islamists. The government says it believes dialogue and development is the best way to pacify tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, notably Waziristan, where top al-Qaeda leaders including Osama bin Laden are believed to be based, sheltered by indigenous fundamentalists.

  British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, making a get-to-know-you visit on Monday, gave the new policy a cautious welcome.

  “We need a far greater degree of precision and detail when we are talking about reconciliation — reconciliation with whom, reconciliation in aid of what?” he said.

  Deals that created safe spaces and freedom of operation for terrorist groups, such as that struck by Musharraf in Waziristan last year, would not work, Miliband suggested.

  Deals that involved militants renouncing violence, as Sufi Muhammad reportedly has done, might be more attractive.

  Not unusually, Britain is saying quietly and in a roundabout way what the US would prefer to state far more forcefully.

  In developing its new softly-softly counter-terrorism policy, Islamabad is simultaneously de-emphasizing military “solutions” and calling on US forces to show much more restraint, particularly in their use of Predator drone attacks in western Pakistan. It wants what it calls a “strategic pause.”

  It is supported by influential figures in Congress and the US state department who fear that, with Musharraf sidelined, renewed invasive operations could fatally undermine Pakistan’s fragile democracy. But ranged against them are Pentagon, CIA and White House officials who say the growing threat emanating from Pakistani territory, especially from al-Qaeda, is so imminently serious that immediate, forceful action is required.

  Michael Hayden, the CIA director, made his view ominously plain last month. The security situation along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he said, “presents clear and present danger to Afghanistan, to Pakistan and to the West in general and to the US in particular.”

  That is the verbal equivalent of pressing the button marked “Detonate.”

  Media reports from Washington this week say US commanders in Afghanistan, anticipating a Taliban spring offensive, are pushing for greater freedom to wage war inside Pakistan. Unidentified US intelligence officials told the New York Times that Pakistani networks had taken on an increasingly important role as allies of al-Qaeda in plotting attacks in Afghanistan and helping foreign operatives plan attacks on targets in western countries such as Britain.

  The US military’s plans reportedly include limited cross-border artillery bombardments, aerial missile attacks, and/or ground incursions by CIA paramilitary squads or US army special operations forces. Only fears about the resulting anti-US and anti-Western backlash in Pakistan — and its impact on its fragile coalition government — appear to be staying Washington’s hand.

  They may not hold off much longer, as the Afghan war escalates, al-Qaeda regenerates and a legacy-minded US president retreats toward the exit, still trophy-hunting for bin Laden and with all guns blazing. For the grudge-settlers and political point-scorers of Islamabad, the hard stuff is about to start.
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