"Musharraf's comments were made public a day after U.S. President George W. Bush said that U.S. forces will 'absolutely' be sent into Pakistan to capture or kill al-Qaeda leaders if they have actionable intelligence," said an article by Strategic Forecasting, a U.S. "think tank" providing intelligence and news analysis to government officials and others.

Bush told the media he was not aware of the threat against Islamabad that Armitage had made and said relations between the U.S. and Pakistani governments are cooperative, not adversarial.

Other indications, however, show that frictions between the two states may grow. Strategic Forecasting said Musharraf used his recent trip "to set the stage for enhanced American operations on Pakistani soil." Washington is prepared to take such action, including unilaterally, against militiamen of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the former rulers of Afghanistan toppled in the 2001 U.S. invasion, who are being tolerated by Islamabad, some reports in the U.S. media say.

The government of Pakistan has abandoned its four-year campaign to take control of the mountainous region on the Afghanistan border called North Waziristan, said an article in the October 2 issue of the conservative magazine Weekly Standard, headlined, "Pakistan Surrenders: The Taliban control the border with Afghanistan."

Islamabad "had entered into a peace agreement with the Taliban insurgency that essentially cedes authority in North Waziristan, the mountainous tribal region bordering Afghanistan, to the Taliban and al-Qaeda," the magazine stated. It added that on September 15 "the blow was compounded" when the Pakistani government released 2,500 "foreign fighters" from prison.

Pakistan's government last spring abandoned efforts to control South Waziristan, the Standard said. Waziristan is an area about the size of New Jersey with a population of some 800,000 people.

"The accord provides that the Pakistani army will abandon outposts and border crossings throughout Waziristan," the Standard said. "Pakistan will return weapons and other equipment seized during Pakistani army operations. …. Of particular concern is the provision allowing non-Pakistani militants to continue to reside in Waziristan as long as they promise to 'keep the peace,'…defined as refraining from attacks on the Pakistani military."

It continued, "Adding to the peril of this surrender, Musharraf has reiterated that the U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan won't be allowed into the tribal areas covered by the peace deal."

At a September 22 joint news conference in Washington with Bush, Musharraf defended the Waziristan accord, stating, "The deal is not at all with the Taliban. This deal is against the Taliban. The deal is with the tribal elders."

"We're on the hunt together," responded Bush. "When the president looks me in the eye and says the tribal deal is intended to reject the Talibanization of the people and that there won't be a Taliban and there won't be al-Qaeda, I believe him."

In a related development, showing how liberal politicians often criticize the Bush administration from the right on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for U.S. president in 2004, called for "the immediate deployment of at least 5,000 additional U.S. troops" to Afghanistan in a September 25 Wall Street Journal column. That would be a 25 percent increase above the 20,000 U.S. soldiers now occupying a large part of the country.

"Less than five years after American troops masterfully toppled the Taliban, the disastrous diversion in Iraq has allowed these radicals the chance to rise again," Kerry wrote. "We cannot allow Afghanistan to become a terrorist stronghold and a staging ground for attacks on America…. When did denying al-Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan cease to be an urgent American priority?"

Detailing his proposed troop-bolstering plan, Kerry insisted, "We must change course." This must include "more special forces to defeat the Taliban, more civil affairs troops to bolster the promising Provisional Reconstruction Teams, more infantry to prevent Taliban infiltration from Pakistan, and more clandestine intelligence units to hunt al Qaeda on both sides of the border."
 
 
Related articles:
German gov’t to send troops to Lebanon  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home