Pakistani officials were trying Monday to save a peace deal supposed to contain militants near the Afghan border, despite U.S. concern that it has provided the Taliban and al-Qaida with an increasingly safe haven, according to AP. Pro-Taliban militants in the lawless North Waziristan region announced the end of the 10-month-old agreement amid weekend bombings and suicide attacks that killed more than 70 people across the northwest, most of them police and soldiers. The violence has added to a sense of crisis in Pakistan and challenged the ability of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to confront Islamic extremism just as he faces a growing pro-democracy movement ahead of year-end elections. Signed in September, the North Waziristan deal crowned a shift in strategy by Musharraf after the army lost hundreds of soldiers in operations against al-Qaida hideouts in the mountains near the border with Afghanistan. The accord saw the army pull troops back to barracks or to positions on the frontier in return for pledges to expel foreign fighters and halt militant attacks in Pakistan and in neighboring Afghanistan. It was supposed to open the way for a massive development program which the U.S. has pledged US$750 million over the next five years and which Musharraf says will ultimately dry up militancy. But some U.S. military officers claimed that cross-border attacks surged in its wake and U.S. counterterrorism officials are warning that the deal allowed al-Qaida to step up training and planning, possibly for another Sept. 11-style attack in the West. Ali Mohammed Jan Aurakzai, governor of North West Frontier Province, which includes several border areas where militants have gained ground, said the Waziristan deal had brought a degree of stability and its demise would cause «severe damage.» «Irritants» raised by both sides could be resolved through talks, Aurakzai, a former army general who helped draw up the disputed peace deal, said on state-run Pakistan television late Monday. He gave no update on any negotiations. However, an intelligence official said a delegation of government-backed tribal elders held negotiations Monday with militant leaders in North Waziristan's main town of Miran Shah. The militants were being urged to stick with the agreement and told that the government would compensate people who had suffered from earlier military operations, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity since he was not authorized to speak to the press. The Foreign Ministry confirmed that talks were in progress. «The peace agreement was not scuttled by the government. It remains in dialogue with the tribal elders,» ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said. Pakistan authorities were also probing suspected links between the violence in the northwest and the captured Red Mosque, where more than 100 people died in an eight-day siege that ended with a commando raid last week. Officials have suggested that the mosque's radical clerics had connections with militants in North Waziristan and in the Swat Valley further north, where a hardline cleric, Maulana Fazlullah, went into hiding at the weekend in the face of a security clampdown. The Red Mosque clerics and their student followers had pressed for Taliban-style rule in Pakistan and launched a vigilante, anti-vice campaign in the capital. Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim said authorities believed that foreign fighters had been among the heavily armed militants who holed up in the mosque. «Do you think they would have given themselves up? They were trained militants and they went down fighting,» Azim told The Associated Press. However, he identified none of the foreigners believed killed in the raid and said the investigation of scores of captured suspects was still ongoing.
