ARLINGTON, Virginia — The Pakistani government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif began formal talks with the Taliban this week in a bid to end an insurgency that has killed thousands of people over the last decade and left vast swathes of the country under the control of militant Islamists.
The talks are being viewed as a last ditch attempt to prevent a Pakistani government assault on militant strongholds in the country’s lawless northwest tribal areas.
The talks between the Pakistani government and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella alliance of militant factions more commonly referred to as the Pakistani Taliban, began Thursday, when a four-member negotiating team appointed by Sharif met for a few hours with three TTP representatives at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa House in Islamabad.
After the talks concluded at the government guest house in the Pakistani capital, the two sides emerged and the head of the TTP delegation, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, a prominent religious scholar, read out a joint statement.
According to the joint statement, the government negotiating team, headed by Pakistani journalist Irfan Siddiqui, had put forward five basic conditions for the talks to succeed, including the establishment of an immediate cease fire and a requirement that the discussions remain within the framework of the country’s constitution.
The Pakistani government also is insisting that the scope of the talks be limited to areas of the country affected by the insurgency, that the talks not last long and that the Taliban clarify the status of a separate nine-member committee that they have established.
The Taliban delegation, which is comprised of negotiators nominated by the TTP, instead of actual Taliban members, requested clarification of the Pakistani government negotiating teams’ mandate, and asked whether government negotiators were empowered to make decisions and act on demands made by the militant Islamist group.
The delegation representing the TTP also said it wanted access to the prime minister, the chief of the Pakistani army and the head of the country’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.
The two sides made no mention of the Pakistani Taliban’s longtime demand that Shariah, or Islamic law, be instituted in Pakistan, home to myriad violent Islamist groups that operate openly with impunity.
It is unclear how the government’s condition that the talks be limited to the areas of Pakistan affected by the insurgency will line up with the Taliban’s demand that an austere and unbending form of Shariah be imposed in the entire country.
The TTP came into fruition in late 2007, when a number of militant factions coalesced under the leadership of Baitullah Mehsud, a tribesman from South Waziristan, a tribal area along the border with neighboring Afghanistan. Baitullah Mehsud was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2009, and his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, who is of no relation to Baitullah, died in late 2013 in a missile attack launched from another of the unmanned, remotely-piloted American aircraft.
Today, the TTP is a loose coalition of militant Islamist factions that conducts almost daily suicide bombings and maintains a virtual state with in a state in parts of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), a large swath of territory that abuts neighboring Afghanistan.
A highly tribal society that has long complained that it is marginalized by Pakistan’s distant central government, the FATA region is largely beyond the control of Pakistani authorities. The FATA region, which is governed by a different set of laws than the rest of Pakistan, is inhabited by tribes of ethnic Pashtuns.
It is from these Pashtun tribes that the TTP draws the overwhelming majority of its fighters.
Once confined to the FATA region and adjacent areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, which is also dominated by ethnic Pashtuns, the TTP now operates in parts of Punjab Province and as far away as the port city of Karachi. The militant Sunni Islamist group, which is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Pakistanis since 2007, is still an overwhelmingly Pashtun organization, but now has other ethnic groups among its ranks.
– Eric Erdahl
Sources: BBC, Reuters, BBC, New York Times
Photo: Washington Post