ISLAMABAD, 7 August 2007 — Tribal elders in Pakistan’s Waziristan region said they would not go to Kabul on Thursday for a grand assembly aimed at building confidence between Pakistan and Afghanistan and dampening support for the Taleban.
During the four-day grand assembly, or jirga, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf are due to address clerics, politicians, writers and tribal chiefs from the ethnic Pashtun lands that straddle the border.
The assembly will take place almost 11 months after Musharraf and Karzai agreed to this joint approach in Washington, in an effort to mend deteriorating relations between two crucial US allies.
When he was in Washington last September, Musharraf also got President George W. Bush’s backing for a peace deal between his government and militants in North Waziristan, a region regarded as a hotbed of support for the Taleban and Al-Qaeda. That pact fell apart last month, and the US expects Pakistan’s military to strike at militant targets in Waziristan.
Mamoor Khan, chief of North Waziristan’s Wazir Toorikhel tribe said the absence of Taleban representatives rendered the jirga pointless. “It has been decided that we’ll not attend that jirga,” he said.
“If Taleban aren’t considered as a party then whom should we talk to. Disputes and problems are always settled among opponent groups.” Tribal leaders also want Pakistan to withdraw troops from check posts in North Waziristan, as condition for participation in the assembly.
“How can we go there and talk about peace while our own home is burning? There is unrest and a military operation going on,” Sen. Saleh Shah Qureshi, from South Waziristan, said.
Afghanistan’s Taleban rejected the assembly as a “waste of time and money” that would achieve nothing. “The US just wants to seek public support for its illegal and inhuman actions through this jirga,” said Taleban spokesman Zaibullah Mujahid. Seven hundred elders from both countries are due to attend the jirga.
A similar gathering will be held in Pakistan, but no date has been set yet.
A Taleban resurgence in the last two years led to accusations by Afghan officials that the insurgents were organizing and launching attacks from the safety of sanctuaries on Pakistani soil. Pakistan denies the allegations.
Meanwhile, Muslim religious leaders were trying yesterday to broker a cease-fire between pro-Taleban militants and Pakistani security forces in North Waziristan, where a military post came under rocket attack overnight, sparking a gunbattle, officials said.
Violence has surged across Pakistan’s northwestern border with Afghanistan in the past month. There were no reports of casualties in Monday’s gunbattle, but over the weekend, a bombing at a bus station and fighting left at least 24 people dead in the frontier region. Yesterday, a remote-controlled bomb exploded near a car carrying an air force officer on the outskirts of the city of Peshawar, wounding him, his son and driver, said Salim Khan, a police officer. He said authorities were investigating who was behind the attack.
The Pakistan Air Force gave a different account. It said that a “fire cracker” placed at the roadside had slightly damaged a bus and that three air force personnel had suffered minor injuries. A 13-member team of Muslim clerics has started efforts to broker a cease-fire between militants and security forces in North Waziristan, an intelligence official said. The delegation held talks with Aurangzeb Khan, the top government administrator in North Waziristan, on Sunday and they were expected to meet with militant leaders in a day or two, said the official.
