Imran Khan talks with Taliban: Why it's a dud peace plan for Pak

In April 2004, Nek Muhammad Wazir stood on stage near his home in the Shakai valley, glowing as Pakistan’s XI corps placed an improbably-colourful garland around his neck.  “Whatever happened, happened”, the feared jihadist commander told Lieutenant-General Syed Safdar Husain, “we will not fight each other again”. “The tribal people”, he went on, “are Pakistan’s atomic bomb. When India attacks Pakistan, if you look into history, you will see the tribals defending 14,000 kilometres of the border. No one can dare attack Pakistan from here. The garland was turned out to be a noose. Less than three months after the Shakai deal, a Hellfire missile locked on to Nek Muhammad’s home as he was eating lunch, guided by a signal broadcast from a chip planted by an Inter-Services Intelligence agent. It was the Central Intelligence Agency’s first drone strike in Pakistan, carried out on the basis of a secret Pakistani request. [caption id=“attachment_793991” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Earlier this week, Imran Khan’s party said its first task is to open talks with the Taliban and end America’s drone war in Pakistan[/caption] Earlier this week, cricket icon and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf leader Imran Khan promised to open talks with Nek Muhammad’s Taliban successors. There’s good reason, though, for his fan-club not to listen out for the sound of peace breaking out. Like so many of Khan’s Twitter-sized brainwaves, talking to the Taliban is a rehash of failed ideas invented by Pakistan’s military establishment.  In 2004, the United States pushed Musharraf into opening operations against Arab, Chechen and Uzbek jihadists operating from Pakistan’s South Waziristan agency.  The offensive proved disastrous. Pakistan’s army had neither the will nor the counter-insurgency skills  to take on men it had, until 9/11, considered its strategic partners. Facing severe losses, Musharraf sold the United States the idea that he could co-opt the jihadist leadership using his intelligence services. It seemed, at first, to work. In April, 2004, Nek Muhammad agreed to severe support to the armies of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek jihadists operating against Afghanistan from the Shakai valley. In return, Pakistan’s armed forces called off their offensive. Less than days later, though, the Shakai agreement unravelled.  Nek Muhammad refused to hand over foreign jihadists and began assassinating traditional tribal leaders who competed with him for power. Nek Muhammad’s story helps understand how that happened—and why talking to the Taliban hasn’t, and won’t, work.  Put simply, Nek Muhammad used the jihadist movement to seize power at gunpoint, something he had no prospect of doing through either democratic means or the traditional tribal structure. The deals were a great way to show the population that the government feared and respected the jihadists—but men like Nek Muhammad understood that peace, if it actually came, would threaten their new-found power. There are several accounts that claim the Taliban are tribal rebels against the Pakistani state. In fact, they’re rebels against the traditional order. The son of a landlord from the village of Kalosha in South Waziristan, Nek Muhammad belonged to a new generation of young men with some education and wealth, impatient with the traditional power structure.  He received a schooling at an influential Islamist-controlled seminary, the Jamia Dar-ul-Uloom, before going to study at a college run by the secular-nationalist Pakhtunkho Awami Party. He dropped out soon after, and set up a shop in the main bazaar of Wana, South Waziristan’s main town. Less than 18 years old at the time, Nek Muhammad volunteered for service with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. He was operating alongside the Taliban by 1995-1996. He became close friends with Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan chief Tahir Yaldashev and Uighur jihadist Hasan Mohsin. Following the events of 9/11, Nek Muhammad returned to Waziristan—and grabbed power in the Shakai valley, using his al-Qaeda contacts. Pakistan’s army, still hoping the plant jihadists back in power in Kabul, wasn’t displeased. Every peace deal since Shakai has ended like it, for pretty much the same reasons. In February, 2005, the Pakistan army signed a peace deal with Baitullah Mehsud, the chief of the Taliban operating in the Srarogha area of South Waziristan.  This deal didn’t make it incumbent on the Taliban to give up their guns or surrender foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda. Inside of months, though, clashes broke out again.  In August, 2009, a CIA drone strike eliminated Mehsud—but his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, is still enormously powerful. Perhaps the most unsuccessful peace effort involved Maulana Fazlullah, whose jihadists barred Swat’s girls from schools and unveiled women from the streets. In July 2007, Pakistan’s armed forces raided the Lal Masjid, a seminary from where Islamists began projecting power inside Islamabad itself. The violence continued into 2008, when the Awami National Party-led coalition government—which Khan’s PTI has now defeated—took power in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.  The ANP jumped into negotiations, just as Khan now promises to do.  The two sides signed a 16-point agreement on May 21 that year.  Inside of four weeks, Fazlullah resumed attacking government offices, schools and even shops. In February, 2009, a desperate ANP gave in, and agreed to implement the shari’a-based Nizam-e-Adl laws—in effect, conceding Fazlullah’s demands. Floggings, beheadings and of suicide-bombings replaced the law. The jihadists overran Mingora, Swat’s commercial centre, in May, 2009, and soon took over Buner and Shangla. Finally, with the Taliban just 60 kilometres from Islamabad, the army stepped in. Fazlullah fled—but the killings still continue. The ANP, which struck the peace deals, was literally forced out of the election contest by murderous attacks which claimed the lives of hundreds of its members. For Khan and his PTI, there are some obvious lessons: peace deals have served to widen the geographical reach of jihadists and enhance their lethality.  “None of the agreements with Taliban factions involved in attacks in Pakistan”, Daud Khattak noted in a superb article, “lasted for more than a few months, and the breaking of each agreement resulted in severe bouts of violence including attacks on government installations, security forces and civilians”. Leaders across South Asia, have gone down the same road as Khan, seduced by the hope that they can buy-up the support of religious and ethnic extremists—witness Indira Gandhi’s romance with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, or Rajiv Gandhi’s flirtation with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In short order, they’ve learned that riding the tiger also means you’re the meal nearest at hand. Albert Einstein had a useful definition of insanity: doing the same thing again and again, hoping it would yield different results. The dud peace plan that’s come out of Imran Khan’s dim-idea factory will, almost certainly, have the same end.