ISLAMABAD, 17 May 2008 — Defense Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar said yesterday that talks with the Taleban were in the interest of the country even as militants beheaded a Pakistani soldier to avenge a US missile strike in the northeast.
Talks with Taleban leaders were held earlier and are being held now, Mukhtar asserted while talking to reporters at the PIA office in the southern port city of Karachi. The minister said that if an agreement with the Taleban materialized, it would benefit the whole world and militant activity across the border in Afghanistan could be controlled.
Mukhtar said Pakistan would take up the issue of the missile strike in Bajaur with the United States after ascertaining facts. He said such attacks inside Pakistani territory were discussed with Washington in the past and they resulted in reducing the number of attacks.
Authorities yesterday found the body of a paramilitary soldier beheaded by Taleban insurgents in a tribal area where Wednesday’s missile strike left 12 people dead. A note left on the corpse said the soldier had been killed in revenge for the attack in Damadola village in Bajaur tribal district near the Afghan border.
The soldier was kidnapped on Thursday night and his decapitated body dumped on the roadside some eight kilometers from a paramilitary post near the main town of Khar, local official Mowaz Khan said. “This is our revenge for the US missile attack,” the note signed by militant group Tehreek-e-Taleban Pakistan, said.
Militants in the troubled semi-autonomous region have in the past kidnapped and killed soldiers, officials and pro-government figures accused of working with Americans, as part of a campaign to maintain their stronghold.
Meanwhile, a rift in Pakistan’s coalition government widened yesterday after the appointment of a disputed figure to a key post in the administration drew protests from ex-Premier Nawaz Sharif.
Sharif pulled his party’s ministers from the Cabinet earlier this week after the government failed to meet a pledge to restore judges ousted under President Pervez Musharraf.
Asif Ali Zardari, who leads the largest party in the coalition, hopes to persuade Sharif to return soon and stabilize an administration facing huge economic problems as well as pressure from the West to curb militancy.
But a spokesman for Sharif said yesterday that the appointment of the new governor of Punjab province had only embittered relations between the two erstwhile partners. “We should have been taken into confidence” before the decision on the governorship, spokesman Sadiqul Farooq said. “If further steps are taken unilaterally like this, then of course the coalition gets weaker.”
Salman Taseer, the new governor of Punjab, was allegedly arrested and beaten by police during Sharif’s first government in the early 1990s after publishing details of alleged corruption in the administration.
Farooq accused Taseer of using his newspapers in the past for “character assassination” against Sharif and said his party was worried that Taseer could try to obstruct the provincial government. Sharif’s party won most of the seats in Punjab, the country’s biggest and richest province, and Sharif’s brother is expected to take over as its chief minister next month.
— With input from agencies
