HAIDER
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PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Putting an abrupt end to the Pakistani government’s adherence to a cease-fire with the Taliban on Thursday, military jets launched heavy airstrikes against militants in the Khyber tribal region bordering Afghanistan, officials said.
The airstrikes were the first military actions against Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, as the Pakistani Taliban are officially known, since the two sides declared a cease-fire at the beginning of March, dealing a new blow to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s faltering efforts to engage the militants in peace talks.
The Taliban declared that the cease-fire with the government had formally ended on April 16, but that they were still engaged in the talks.
A senior security official said the assault on Thursday was aimed at a militant cell responsible for an attack in the nearby city of Peshawar on Monday night that killed five policemen.
The official said the same group carried out a bomb attack that killed at least 22 people on April 9 in a fruit market in Islamabad. The attack initially had been claimed by a little-known nationalist faction from Baluchistan Province. But the claim was immediately dismissed by Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, and there was little information about which group carried out the attack until Thursday.
The Khyber tribal agency, a traditional smuggling area that lies along a major NATO supply route into Afghanistan, has become a hub for several militant groups with ties to the Pakistani Taliban or to various criminal networks. The latest airstrikes hit targets close to Peshawar, the regional capital, and in the Tirah Valley, a mountainous center of hashish production.
One military official said that intercepted militant communications suggested many casualties — officials variously estimated the death toll between 34 and 40 people — but a senior Taliban commander, speaking by telephone, said he could not confirm those figures.
However, he did say that retaliatory attacks would be coming. “Once those deaths are confirmed, we will certainly avenge their deaths,” he said.
The strikes came one day after Mr. Khan met with a government committee that has been talking with the Taliban. One committee member said the government was ready to release 13 low-level Taliban fighters as part of a confidence-building process, but it would do so only if the Taliban reciprocated with a gesture of equal weight.
“Our demand is peace and normalcy. Let the militants come up with their own demand, and we shall see if we can consider them,” said the committee member, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The state of peace efforts in Pakistan has direct bearing on Afghanistan, where American combat troops are in the process of leaving the country by the end of this year, and where Afghan security forces regularly come under attack from militants based in Pakistan.
That dynamic was discussed by President Obama’s regional representative, Ambassador James F. Dobbins, in a meeting with Mr. Sharif’s foreign affairs adviser, Sartaj Aziz, on Thursday in Islamabad, according to a statement by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry.
The two officials discussed American-Pakistani relations, the Taliban peace process and “post-2014 matters,” the statement said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/w...launches-airstrikes-against-taliban.html?_r=0
The airstrikes were the first military actions against Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, as the Pakistani Taliban are officially known, since the two sides declared a cease-fire at the beginning of March, dealing a new blow to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s faltering efforts to engage the militants in peace talks.
The Taliban declared that the cease-fire with the government had formally ended on April 16, but that they were still engaged in the talks.
A senior security official said the assault on Thursday was aimed at a militant cell responsible for an attack in the nearby city of Peshawar on Monday night that killed five policemen.
The official said the same group carried out a bomb attack that killed at least 22 people on April 9 in a fruit market in Islamabad. The attack initially had been claimed by a little-known nationalist faction from Baluchistan Province. But the claim was immediately dismissed by Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, and there was little information about which group carried out the attack until Thursday.
The Khyber tribal agency, a traditional smuggling area that lies along a major NATO supply route into Afghanistan, has become a hub for several militant groups with ties to the Pakistani Taliban or to various criminal networks. The latest airstrikes hit targets close to Peshawar, the regional capital, and in the Tirah Valley, a mountainous center of hashish production.
One military official said that intercepted militant communications suggested many casualties — officials variously estimated the death toll between 34 and 40 people — but a senior Taliban commander, speaking by telephone, said he could not confirm those figures.
However, he did say that retaliatory attacks would be coming. “Once those deaths are confirmed, we will certainly avenge their deaths,” he said.
The strikes came one day after Mr. Khan met with a government committee that has been talking with the Taliban. One committee member said the government was ready to release 13 low-level Taliban fighters as part of a confidence-building process, but it would do so only if the Taliban reciprocated with a gesture of equal weight.
“Our demand is peace and normalcy. Let the militants come up with their own demand, and we shall see if we can consider them,” said the committee member, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The state of peace efforts in Pakistan has direct bearing on Afghanistan, where American combat troops are in the process of leaving the country by the end of this year, and where Afghan security forces regularly come under attack from militants based in Pakistan.
That dynamic was discussed by President Obama’s regional representative, Ambassador James F. Dobbins, in a meeting with Mr. Sharif’s foreign affairs adviser, Sartaj Aziz, on Thursday in Islamabad, according to a statement by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry.
The two officials discussed American-Pakistani relations, the Taliban peace process and “post-2014 matters,” the statement said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/w...launches-airstrikes-against-taliban.html?_r=0
