Govt, facing harsh criticism, offers to reshape policy

[pkpatriotic]

Govt, facing harsh criticism, offers to reshape policy
In-camera session to continue till next Thursday
By Asim Yasin
Friday, October 17, 2008

ISLAMABAD: As the opposition and the allies of the government severely criticised the official policy on the war on terror, PPP’s Mian Raza Rabbani offered during the in-camera session of parliament on Thursday that the government was ready to reshape its policy as per guidelines provided by parliament.

According to sources, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, despite severely criticising the government’s policy, offered to mediate between the government and Taliban. He asked the government to have direct dialogue with the Taliban, saying if President Hamid Karzai can have dialogue with the Taliban in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan too can do the same.

The sources said Maulana Fazl’s speech was also appreciated by Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, who went to his seat and embraced him. The MPs began debate on the war on terror on Thursday, which lasted four hours. All the opposition parties and even the key allies of the government came hard on the government for what they called was the continuation of the policy adopted by the previous regime.

Opposition Leader in the National Assembly Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, who kicked off the debate, asked the government to present details of all the agreements that were signed with the United States in the past with regard to the war on terror.

He said the serious threats could befall the integrity of Pakistan in case the country continued the policies of former president Pervez Musharraf. He asked the government to present its own policy on the war on terror before parliament.

Chaudhry Nisar made it clear that it was not Pakistan’s war but was imposed on us. “The people gave us a mandate for change but so far the same old policies were being pursued.” He asked the government to negotiate with the tribes rather than using force against them. He also urged the government to pay attention to the grievances of the heirs of the missing persons and those killed in the Lal Masjid operation.

He said so far the government has briefed parliament on the operational aspects without outlining its policy. However, Leader of the House in the Senate Mian Raza Rabbani, in his 90-minute speech, strongly defended the government policy and negated the assertion that the coalition government was pursuing Musharraf’s policies. “The government has devised its own policy and we do not own the policy of the previous regime,” sources quoted Raza Rabbani as saying.

Raza Rabbani also listed 10 points, which, he said, have emerged in the form of consensus during the in-camera session, adding, the government was ready to reshape its policies in the light of the guidelines provided by the MPs. He assured the House that the government would not compromise on the sovereignty of the country.

Maulana Fazlur Rehman in his speech asserted that the religious Madaris were not engaged in training youths for terrorism, adding, the conditions may further exacerbate if the use of force is not halted in the tribal areas.

He said the so-called war against terrorism is being waged in to please the West and the USA, urging the government to enter into direct negotiations with Taliban and formulate a new policy on Afghanistan.

Maulana Fazl wondered why a government, which could force Musharraf to resign, was unable to change his policies. The Pakistan Muslim League-Q leader and Opposition Leader in the Senate Kamil Ali Agha said the basis on which Musharraf was served charge sheet was still there and his policies were still being pursued. The in-camera session of parliament has been extended till next Thursday, enabling the government to evolve consensus on a joint resolution.

 

[IceCold]

This is high time that we have a review of our foreign policy and specially with regards to the US. Enough damage has already been done. We need to formulate a policy which then should be presented to the parliment for approval. Afterall this is what democracy is all about. And if one man show was to continue then why did the Nation wasted time in elections, Musharraf was doing very well w.r.t Pakistan untill ofcourse very recently when electricity and flour crisis marginalized his popularity.

 

[pkpatriotic]

Pakistani politicians divided over action on terror

• Parliament session split as extremists denounce Nato
• Soaring poverty feared to increase suicide attacks
Saeed Shah
Friday October 17 2008

A deep rift over anti-terror policy has opened up within Pakistan's political class, as extremist violence and an economic crisis push the country to the verge of collapse. A special session of parliament called by the government to forge a political consensus on the "war on terror" has backfired spectacularly as parties, including some in the ruling coalition, denounced the alliance with Washington and Nato rather than backing the army to take on the Pakistani Taliban.

A party in the coalition government, the religious Jamiat-Ulama-I-Islam party, has even demanded that, as parliamentarians had received a presentation from the army, Pakistan's Taliban movement should also be allowed to address them. It comes as the political and economic situation worsens, with intensified suicide bomb attacks and an alarming depletion in Pakistan's foreign exchange reserves. The country is seeking an emergency $10bn bailout from the international community, while a severe shortage of electricity is crippling business and punishing households.

Critics of the government, which is led by controversial president Asif Ali Zardari, complain that there is a paralysis of decision-making and policy. A leaked US top secret National Intelligence Estimate on Pakistan concludes that the country is "on the edge". A US official was quoted summing up the assessment as "no money, no energy, no government".

Yesterday a US missile strike inside Pakistan's tribal border area with Afghanistan killed up to six suspected militants, and a suicide attack on a police station in the north-west killed three officers and wounded 15.

The economic nosedive will aid recruitment to extremist groups, experts fear, and force more poor families to send their children to the free madrassa schools, which offer an exclusively religious curriculum. Inflation is running at 25%, or up to 100% for many staple food items, and unemployment is growing, pushing millions more into poverty. The rupee has lost around 30% of its value so far this year.

"The canvas of terrorism is expanding by the minute," said Faisal Saleh Hayat, a former interior minister.

"It's not only ideological motivation. Put that together with economic deprivation and you have a ready-made force of Taliban, al-Qaida, whatever you want to call them. You will see suicide bombers churned out by the hundred," he said.

The army is engaged in a bloody operation against militants in Bajaur, part of the tribal border area, and in Swat, a valley in the north-west. The Pakistani Taliban is closely tied to al-Qaida and is entrenched across the tribal belt with much of the north-west in its grip. Other militant groups have networks that span the entire country.

But there have been some positive security developments. An editorial yesterday in The News, a Pakistani daily, asks readers to "stand against terror", pointing out that some groups of tribesmen in the north-west have raised their own militias to fight the Taliban. It also wrote about a meeting of Islamic scholars in the eastern city of Lahore this week that issued a fatwa (edict) against suicide bombings.

The Pakistan People's party, which leads the coalition government that came to power in March after over eight years of army rule, had hoped to get parliamentarians behind the military action. An army general gave a confidential briefing to members of parliament. But the biggest opposition party, led by former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, called for the government to start talks instead with the extremists, without any preconditions.

"The majority of the people of Pakistan do not see it as our war. We are fighting for somebody else and we are suffering because of that," said Tariq Azim, a former minister in the previous government of Pervez Musharraf, whose party now sits in the opposition. "At the moment the only ones toeing the line are the People's party."

Members of parliament are particularly angered by recent signals from Washington that it is prepared to talk to the Afghan Taliban, while telling Pakistan that it must fight its Taliban menace. "They [the US] are showing a lot more flexibility on their side of the border," said Khurram Dastagir, a member of parliament for Sharif's party. "The US are trying to externalise their failure in Afghanistan by dumping it on us."

It seems that the best the People's party can hope for is a mildly-worded resolution in parliament, with a thin majority, far short of the consensus it sought at a time when the very existence of Pakistan is in peril from the threat of extremists.

Some parliamentarians, including the Awami National party, which is in the ruling coalition and based in the insurgency-plagued north-west, questioned whether the army was sincere in pursuing the extremists.

"There are still training camps, still [terrorist] sanctuaries, still cross-border movement in the tribal area," said Bushra Gohar, senior vice-president of the Awami National party. "There's duplicity, at some level, in our policies."

 

[pkpatriotic]

Pakistani Legislators Show Little Appetite for a Fight
By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — An unusual parliamentary debate organized to forge a national policy on how to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda has exposed deep ambivalence about the militants, even as their reach extends to suicide attacks in the capital.

In one of his first initiatives as president, Asif Ali Zardari called the session in an effort to mobilize Pakistan’s political parties and its public to support the fight against the militants, which he has now called Pakistan’s war.

But instead, the nearly two weeks of closed sessions have been dominated by calls for dialogue with the Taliban and peppered with opposition to what lawmakers condemned as a war foisted on Pakistan by the United States, according to participants.

The tenor of the debate has highlighted the difficulties facing Mr. Zardari and Washington as they urgently try to focus Pakistan’s full attention on the militant threat at a time when the Pakistani military is locked in heavy fighting in the tribal areas.

Mr. Zardari’s predecessor, Pervez Musharraf, who was long both president and leader of the army, never consulted Parliament, and he as well as the fight against the militants came to be seen as tools of American policy and grew increasingly unpopular.

By contrast, Mr. Zardari, as the newly elected leader of Pakistan’s fledgling civilian government, will need the backing of Parliament and the public if he is to live up to his pledge to fight terrorism, which he made during a visit to Washington this month.

But the parliamentary proceedings, which included criticism of a lengthy military briefing by a senior general on the conduct of the war, showed that the political elites had little stomach for battling the militants.

In one sign, Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-N, sent a letter on Monday to the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, calling for dialogue with the militants. The letter suggested a halt in military operations while negotiations were given a chance, according to Ahsan Iqbal, an aide to Mr. Sharif.

In an interview last week, Mr. Sharif said, “What is wrong with talking?”

He said a distinction had to be made between the Taliban, whose members could be talked to, and Al Qaeda, whose adherents could not. A national committee should be formed to decide whom Pakistan should negotiate with, Mr. Sharif said.

Differentiating between the two groups was one of the themes of the debate, according to participants, on the grounds that Qaeda members are outsiders to Pakistan and the Taliban are mostly Pashtuns living in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Even the suicide bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed more than 50 people last month, did not provide much of a call to arms. “I thought the Marriott would change everyone’s attitude, but it has not,” said Farook Saleem, a newspaper columnist who supports fighting the militants.

The speeches in Parliament expressed so much opposition to fighting the militants that it was doubtful that the governing Pakistan Peoples Party could engineer an “appropriate resolution,” said Sardar Aseff Ahmed Ali, a senior member of the party and a former foreign minister.

A religious party, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl, part of the coalition with the Pakistan Peoples Party, voiced particularly strong opposition to the war against the militants, Mr. Ali said.

“They want the army to pull out of everything and start talks with the militants in North and South Waziristan, in Swat,” Mr. Ali said. The army is fighting the Taliban in Swat, a settled region of the North-West Frontier Province, and has fought the Taliban in Waziristan, an area of the tribal belt, which borders the province.

It is possible, Mr. Ali said, that the divergent opinions within the coalition will produce a parliamentary resolution that is “so hugely diluted that the whole exercise is left futile.”

Behind the scenes, the idea of a parliamentary debate was encouraged by the leader of the Pakistani Army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, as a way to garner political support for the military efforts, according to two Pakistanis familiar with his thinking.

The Pakistani military began a campaign against the Taliban and its Qaeda backers in the tribal area of Bajaur two months ago, an effort that American commanders have applauded as a way to stop the militants from crossing into Afghanistan and attacking American forces.

At a news conference in Islamabad on Monday, the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, Richard A. Boucher, called the “tough actions” of the Pakistanis “very impressive.”

At a cabinet meeting attended by General Kayani in late July, the civilian government gave the military permission for operations against the militants.

But General Kayani was eager for a parliamentary debate that would show that the army was responding to civilian government, according to the Pakistanis who spoke to General Kayani.

In that vein, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the director general of military operations for the Pakistani Army, who has been selected to lead the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, briefed a joint session of Parliament two weeks ago. The presence of a senior general before Parliament was viewed in much of the Pakistani news media as an encouraging, if small, sign of civilian control of the military.

Over four hours, General Pasha described what the army had done in campaigns against militants over seven years, showed images of militants slaughtering civilians, and said more than 1,500 Pakistani soldiers had died in the operations, according to Parliament members.

But the briefing was poorly received by politicians, who said it revealed little that was new. Lawmakers also criticized General Pasha for not offering a strategy for the future.

Attendance was also poor. The Senate and the National Assembly comprise 442 members, but on one day last week only 40 were on hand, and the speaker, Fahmida Mirza, admonished the politicians for being so desultory.

President Zardari was away on a trip to China last week, and his absence appeared, symbolically at least, to undermine the debate.

Also absent were the minister of defense, Ahmad Mukhtar, and the senior adviser to the Interior Ministry, Rehman Malik, both major figures in the effort against terrorism, who accompanied Mr. Zardari in China. The national security adviser, Mahmud Ali Durrani, was on a trip to India.

In their speeches, the politicians stressed the need for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, said Jehangir Tareen, the leader of a faction of the Pakistan Muslim League.

In its precarious economic situation, with dwindling foreign exchange reserves and high inflation, Pakistan cannot afford a continuing battle against the militants, which has driven away foreign investment, he said.

“The sense of the house is that there is no military solution to this,” Mr. Tareen said. “This is not a war we want to be part of. There is a sentiment that we are being pushed to do all this by the United States. We want this war to end.”