Analysis: An al-Qaida sanctuary?

Analysis: An al-Qaida sanctuary? Part Two
By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 (UPI) -- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's new strategy for dealing with the Taliban insurgency in the country's lawless tribal regions on the Afghan border through a hearts and minds approach, rather than relying on the military, will need to show results quickly, Pentagon officials say.

The most senior U.S. general in NATO, which has the security mandate on the Afghan side of the border, said Thursday that he would be conferring with NATO allies "in another month or so."

Gen. James Jones told reporters at a Washington briefing that he would then return to Islamabad to tell the Pakistanis "how we see it from our side of the border in terms of what the effect was. Because I think the effect will be seen very quickly."

Jones said he did not wish to second-guess the strategy -- as some have done privately -- but cautioned "I think we will clearly see over the next 30, 60, 90 days where the situation along the border is better, worse, stays the same or whatever."

Some fret the deal may take longer than that to show results.

Hassan Abbas, a former Pakistani police official who has dealt with tribal leaders, told United Press International: "The agreement is likely to take time to bear fruit. Six months to a year at least."

"There has to be time for the development and other economic incentives to take hold," said Abbas, currently a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center. "The question is whether (Musharraf) will get it."

U.S. officials are publicly upbeat about the new strategy, ushered in earlier this month when a peace deal was inked between Pakistan's federal government and local leaders in North Waziristan, one of the country's seven semi-autonomous tribal agencies.

Maj. Gen. Shaukut Sultan, spokesman for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, told UPI the deal would also involve the establishment of a "Reconstruction Opportunity Zone" across all seven agencies, and an influx of hundreds of millions of dollars of development cash -- on top of reparations for the damage to property and loss of life caused during the military's operations. Local militants or militiamen captured during the operation have also been released.

"They're paying off the people who signed the deal," said Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department intelligence analyst on Pakistan, now a scholar at the Middle East Institute.

But the people who signed the deal, according to veteran Pashtun reporter Rahimullah Yusufzai, are the very same Taliban whose cross-border incursions from Pakistan are seen by the U.S. military as the life blood of the Afghan insurgency.

"The written agreement clearly states that the agreement is (with)... the tribal elders of North Waziristan, local mujahedin, students and ulema (Islamic clerics) from Utmanzai tribes," he wrote in a recent analysis for Pakistan's The News.

"The 'students' ... are the local Taliban and so are the 'mujahedin.' The ulema are mostly pro-Taliban religious scholars," he says, adding that the deal was actually signed by seven representatives of the local Taliban council. "It is clearly a peace accord with the militants, who showed their military muscle and forced the government to accept their power and negotiate an agreement with them," he concludes.

And some analysts see a worrying convergence of the Taliban, al-Qaida and Islamic militant groups waging a terrorist campaign against the Indian presence in Kashmir, a process French counter-terrorism official turned Nixon Center scholar Alexis Debat refers to as al-Qaida's "Pakistanization."

Debat said local militants had killed or cowed the traditional tribal leadership, and created a sanctuary for al-Qaida terrorists and other militants in the region.

"What was previously a very disparate, very complex mosaic of groups is increasingly ... coming together: the (Pakistani) Taliban, the al-Qaida foreign element and the sectarian Kashmiri element," he said, adding all three were enjoying sanctuary in the lawless tribal areas on the border.

Weinbaum said he believed that was putting it too strongly. He said the relationships between and among the galaxy of Islamic extremists in Pakistan was "very fluid," but that the leadership of the Islamic parties that represented the Taliban remained parochial.

Observers have tended to see Pashtun militants as fiercely opposed to the presence of outsiders, especially armed ones, and concerned with enforcing what they see as traditional Islamic values in their own communities, but less interested in the wider horizons and global ambitions of the Kashmiri jihadi groups.

For their side of the deal, local leaders have pledged not to move around with heavy weapons, to end infiltration by Taliban forces across the border into Afghanistan, and to expel any foreign jihadis who do not adopt what the agreement calls "a peaceable life."

In public, Pakistan has long -- and straight-facedly -- denied that there are cross-border incursions in that area, an assertion Sultan repeated to UPI this week. "The message in private is a little bit different," said a State Department official authorized to speak to the media. "We feel they have an awareness of their real situation."

Jones said NATO will be "forging much, much closer links" with the Pakistanis, "and over time, we will be doing more together simultaneously along the borders to make sure that we reduce the infiltration as much as possible."

Cross-border infiltration is "the litmus test" for the deal, said Weinbaum. A U.S. intelligence official authorized to speak to the media, but not to reveal his name or agency, agreed that would be an important metric for U.S. agencies assessing the success of the new strategy.

The State Department official said another "crude" measure of success would be increased apprehensions of high ranking al-Qaida or Taliban leaders as a result of improved intelligence from a more cooperative local population.

"By withdrawing into the cantonments," the official said of the Pakistani military's new, more low profile stance in the area, "they remove a significant irritant to the local population."

The intelligence official said another "yardstick we will be using" to measure the deal's success would be the "level of activity" of the special commando teams that Pakistan has been using to hunt high value al-Qaida leaders.

Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, formerly the senior-most U.S. military officer in the region, told UPI that: "The test will come if we get hard evidence on bad people in the area and try to pressure Pakistan into acting" militarily, he said, adding that would put them "in a tough spot."

"I have to believe they will act if put into that spot," he concluded. "Musharraf has done it up to now."

Privately, U.S. military officers on the ground are concerned that politics and diplomacy might trump reality in any U.S. assessment of the deal, according to a congressional staffer who recently returned from a visit to the region and was briefed by them.

"If it shows signs of failing, we have to call (the Pakistanis) on it right away," said the staffer.

Weinbaum acknowledged that politics would play a role in any public assessments of the deal's effectiveness. "We'll give him a pass if we think that not to do so will damage his credibility," he said of the U.S. government's attitude to Musharraf.

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Part two of three. The final part next week looks at the impact the deal is likely to have on U.S.-Pakistan relations.

For part 1, click here