A policeman at a funeral for victims of a Taliban attack. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Feb 4 2014 (IPS)

Whether to make war or peace with the Taliban has become a dilemma for the Pakistani government.

Preliminary talks were scheduled to begin Tuesday between a team nominated by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif comprising officials and journalists, and a team supporting the Taliban, comprising mostly religious leaders. But not everyone believes these are the talks that were needed.

“There is no hope of peace because the committees formed by government and the Taliban have no power to negotiate sensitive matters,” says Muhammad Rasool Bangash, a history teacher at the Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in the north of Pakistan.“There is no hope of peace because the committees formed by government and the Taliban have no power to negotiate sensitive matters.”

“The committees should have been represented by government and the Taliban. Without bringing [the] Taliban and the government face-to-face it is difficult to have peace.”

The government has been giving mixed signals. On Jan. 23, at a meeting held under the chairmanship of Sharif, and attended by the top brass of the Pakistan army, it was decided that force would be used against the Taliban.

“We cannot surrender state authority to the Taliban. We will talk to those who want to surrender before talks,” Sharif said in a statement.

Voices calling for convincing dialogue are growing louder as international forces prepare to withdraw from neighbouring Afghanistan by the end of 2014 – a move that is widely expected to strengthen the militants. Meanwhile, the Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP) continues to carry out ruthless attacks.

On Feb. 2, a bomb attack in a Peshawar cinema hall killed five persons. “Continuation of Taliban attacks means they aren’t serious in talks,” says Shahabuddin Khan, an elderly man who migrated to Peshawar from North Waziristan. Peshawar is the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“The withdrawal of U.S. forces will give immense strength to the Taliban who can gain complete control of bordering areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan,” says Shahabuddin Khan.

“The Taliban will get stronger as U.S.-led forces withdraw from Afghanistan,” Z.A. Hilali, professor of international studies at the University of Peshawar, tells IPS. “Pakistan and Afghanistan’s border areas are infested with militants who can pose a serious threat to the governments in these countries.”

Cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, whose party Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI) is in power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, is a staunch supporter of peace talks with the Taliban.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, located near the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan where the Taliban are very active, bears the brunt of Taliban attacks. The Taliban along with Al-Qaeda members took refuge in FATA when their government was toppled in Afghanistan in 2001. Many Taliban members from Afghanistan have merged with Taliban groups from Pakistan.

Imran Khan says military operations against the Taliban since 2004 have not brought any success and the Taliban have only become stronger.

“I have been listening to statements like ‘the back of the Taliban has been broken’, but the results are before the nation. Every day we see attacks in which innocent people are killed. The only way for durable peace is dialogue with militants,” Imran Khan tells IPS.

His party believes that making peace with the Taliban is essential for the progress of Pakistan.

“Without peace, we cannot make progress. There is no investment in the province, and as a result people will get poorer,” says Asad Umar, member of the National Assembly from the PTI.

“We have planned reforms to bring investment to the province. But for that we need to talk to the Taliban to pave the way for peace,” Umar tells IPS.

The Taliban too have been asking the government to begin “serious and meaningful” talks.

Political analyst Dr Abdul Jabbar says talks are important as the government will not be able to match the Taliban’s might after the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan.

“Only 8,000-12,000 soldiers, most of them American, will remain in Afghanistan to assist Afghan forces in their fight against the Taliban,” he says. “In that scenario it would be extremely difficult to battle the Taliban because even at the moment, when there are about 37,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, along with 19,000 forces from other countries in the NATO-led coalition, they are very strong.

“The Taliban are carrying out bomb and suicide attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan at will. And they can pose a serious challenge to both the militancy-prone countries after the international forces leave.”

Sharif has come under much criticism for delaying talks with the Taliban.

Political analysts say he is banking on his party’s good equations with militant groups based in the Punjab province, but that this will not help in the long run. Sharif’s younger brother Shahbaz Sharif has been chief minister of Punjab for the last six years.

“Lately, we have seen several attacks in Punjab. The Taliban have targeted police, army and public places in Punjab, and the situation could get worse,” Jabbar says.

The main opposition Pakistan People’s Party, whose leader Benazir Bhutto was killed in 2007, wants the government to take a clear stand on whether it wants to hold a dialogue or carry out operations against the TTP.

“The entire nation is united on fighting terrorism and the time has come to arrive at a final decision to wipe out the elements who take the lives of innocent people,” Khursheed Shah, PPP member and leader of the opposition in the National Assembly tells IPS.

Imran Khan says the government should take the nation into confidence if it opts for a military operation against the Taliban. Military operations so far have failed to defeat the Taliban, and have displaced about three million tribal people. Further action will only spell disaster, Imran Khan says.

“The only option we have is talks with militants,” Imran Khan tells IPS.

“If the U.S. can talk to the Afghan Taliban, then why can we not talk to the Pakistani Taliban? It is time we came out of the U.S.-led war because we have lost 50,000 people, including 5,000 soldiers and 100 billion dollars in the so-called war.”

With talks over Iran’s nuclear ambitions set to resume Apr. 5 in Almaty, Kazakhstan, there is guarded optimism that negotiators can build on the moderate breakthroughs made in discussions held earlier this year.

“The last rounds of talks in Almaty (in February) and in Turkey (in March) have increased hopes for more progress to be made in April,” Alex Vatanka, an Iranian-born analyst at The Middle East Institute in Washington D.C, told IPS by e-mail.

Both U.S. President Barack Obama and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been readying their domestic audiences for some forward movement in the protracted negotiations.

“In recent weeks, both President Obama and (Ayatollah) Khamenei have in their own ways started to prepare their home audiences for a compromise. And neither side is at the moment pointing to any fundamental obstacles in the path of a deal,” Vatanka told IPS.

In February, the stalled talks between Iran and the P5+1 – the UN Security Council’s five permanent members (China, France, Russia, Britain and the U.S. plus Germany) – resumed after an eight-month hiatus. These talks saw new life breathed into the process which is attempting to reconcile differences over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The process had reached an impasse last June over what seemed like insurmountable differences between the two sides. Iran called for the immediate and unconditional end of sanctions, which have severely damaged its economy. The P5+1 group demanded Iran immediately stop medium-level enrichment and to close the Fordow underground enrichment facility before offering any easing of sanctions.

At the Almaty talks held on Feb. 26-27, the international group, chaired by EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, put some new ideas on the table, believed to be related to Iran suspending 20 percent enrichment for six months and converting its existing enriched uranium into uranium oxide for medical use in exchange for some sanctions-relief, according to the Al-Monitor website.

Iran insists its ambitions are peaceful and in line with its rights as a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, while international negotiators contend Iran’s aims are to obtain nuclear weapons.

“If there is a political will – and I see there is a considerable degree of that on both sides – then the technical details can be resolved,” Vatanka told IPS. “At the same time, a bad political atmosphere can kill an otherwise attainable nuclear agreement.”

The strained political atmosphere is not being helped by the situation in Syria, with Iran a strong ally of the Assad regime in its two-year conflict with armed opposition groups.

IPS reported on Apr. 1 that Javier Solana, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) secretary-general who was Iran’s chief European interlocutor from 2003 to 2009, felt that the opposing positions held by Russia, China, the U.S. and Europe on Syria could weaken the unity of P5+1 and have a knock-on effect on the talks with Iran.

Solana, speaking at a forum at the Brookings Institute in Washington, suggested that Russia and China would most likely oppose any additional sanctions against Tehran if the Almaty talks fail to make much headway, weakening the chances of a diplomatic solution to the problem.

For Vatanka, creating some distance between Syria and the Iranian nuclear issue could be key to reaching an agreement “If the nuclear question can be separated from other issues, then there is a much higher chance for a deal,” he told IPS.

Solving the Iran nuclear question was high on the agenda at the meeting between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Mar. 20. While Netanyahu remained bullish about a military solution, Obama reiterated that time remained for a diplomatic solution, whilst not ruling out other options.

“We prefer to resolve this diplomatically, and there’s still time to do so. Iran’s leaders must understand, however, that they have to meet their international obligations,” Obama told reporters in Jerusalem. But he did not rule out military options, stating that “all options are on the table. We will do what is necessary to prevent Iran from getting the world’s worst weapons.”

Political machinations within Iran as it prepares to go to the polls in June to elect a new president are not necessarily seen as an obstacle to moving forward in the ongoing discussions. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief negotiator for the P5+1 talks, is expected to be a candidate in the elections, but he is not felt to have too much influence, playing second fiddle to the Supreme Leader.

“Ayatollah Khamenei decides the fundamentals on Iran’s nuclear policy and he will be the Leader before and after the elections,” Vatanka told IPS. “Saeed Jalili is not a political heavy weight in his own right. His boss, Khamenei, will call the shots. Jalili does not have an ability to say or do anything different from the Leader.”

Ahead of the resumption of talks, Jalili sounded a challenging note saying on Apr. 4 that Iran’s right to enrichment should be recognised before any progress can be made with the discussions.

Khamenei’s position remains focussed on Iran’s right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

“If the Americans wanted to resolve the issue, this would be a very simple solution: they could recognise the Iranian nation’s right to enrichment and in order to address those concerns, they could enforce the regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Khamenei said in a speech in Mashhad on marking Norouz, the Persian New Year on Mar. 21. “We were never opposed to the supervision and regulations of the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Vatanka is not anticipating any major breakthrough in U.S.-Iran relations as a result of the Almaty talks but sees the prospect of a nuclear deal of some sorts as “the catapult that could start a new era of Washington-Tehran relations.”