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'Militant radicalism lacks popular appeal in Tribal Areas'
 An Afghanistan expert has said that most of the legitimate community representatives from Pakistan's tribal areas and Afghanistan may not embrace central government control, but they reject the militant radicalism that is ravaging their communities. Alex Their, who has spent 14 years working on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told the US Institute of Peace that while a communique from the recently held grand jirga in Kabul signalled commitment to fighting terrorism on both sides of the border, implementation will be hard. The Afghan and Pakistan Taliban groups have guns, funding, and international support, and both the Afghan and Pakistani governments are weak in these areas, he added. He said the idea for the peace jirga emerged over a year ago, and negotiations over location, representation, and agenda were tense given strained Pak-Afghan relations. President Pervez Musharraf was reluctant about the jirga all along, and he cancelled his participation in the opening ceremony in Kabul at the last minute, embarrassing both Presidents Hamid Karzai and George Bush, who had helped to broker the agreement for the meeting. However, due to significant international pressure, he did attend the closing of the jirga and made a remarkable speech acknowledging, for the first time, Pakistan's partial culpability for the ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan. Asked what Bush and Karzai discussed at Camp David during the latter's visit, Their replied that the two presidents focused on the headline issues in their talks: the fight against the Taliban (including the role of Pakistan) and the booming narcotics trade. Significant progress has not been made on either front, and their shared priorities must be to stop the backsliding over the past year and a half of the security situation in Afghanistan, he added. He expressed the fear that despite continued international support abroad and bipartisan support in Washington, Afghanistan is in danger of being dragged down with Iraq. The insurgency in Iraq is also spreading bad news to Afghanistan in the form of increased suicide bombings and other tactics, such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hostage-taking and beheadings. There is a real danger as well that the American public will increasingly lump Afghanistan in with Iraq, and calls for withdrawal will follow apace, in his view. Asked if the US could be influential in repairing the breach between its two allies in the region, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Thier answered that the US has a tremendous amount of influence with both countries. In many ways, Pakistan is a more complex problem for the US than Afghanistan, because its relationship with the Musharraf government and the Pakistani people is less stable. Washington has relied heavily on Gen Musharraf to support the US agenda after September 11, but the Pakistani government has also failed to deliver on critical items on the US agenda, such as removing militant safe havens, shutting down radical madrassas, and reinstating democracy. US military and financial support to Pakistan being significant, Islamabad is unlikely to risk that during a tense domestic period. Posted by: Fred 2007-08-19 |
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