Pakistan's new government has started its peace strategy -- but neither the Taliban nor Washington is committed to it, writes Graham Usher in Mardan Last week a car packed with explosives detonated outside a police station in Mardan, a rustic town in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP). A police officer and two civilians were killed and homes, stalls, shops and streets were blitzed with shrapnel. Tehrik-i-Taliban, or the Taliban Movement of Pakistan (PT), claimed the attack: revenge, said spokesman Maulvi Umar, for a Taliban fighter killed by the police in Mardan some weeks before. Superficially, there was nothing unusual about the hit. Two hundred and fifty people have been killed in attacks in Pakistan in 2008, many of them bearing the signature of the PT. In Mardan alone 10 police stations have been rocketed. Yet the car bomb sent a shiver throughout the NWFP. It was the first act of violence in nearly a month. And it was the first since the formation of a new civilian government committed to dialogue with Pakistan's Islamic militants rather than repression. The peace policy has the support of the majority of Pakistanis and seemed to be working. Not only had Islamist-inspired violence slumped: the perpetrators appeared to be on board. On 23 April the government released from jail Sufi Mohamed, a radical cleric who in the 1990s championed a violent movement for the enforcement of Sharia law in the NWFP's Swat and Malakand regions and, in 2001, led 10,000 ill- armed men to resist the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. Today he says he recognises the government's writ and will use only peaceful means to propagate Sharia. The government also hopes he will tame his son-in-law Mullah Fazlullah, who raised an insurgency in Swat last year. More significantly, the same day saw news that the government, backed by the army, was finalising a peace accord with the Mehsud tribe from the South Waziristan agency on the Afghan border. This means talking to Baitullah Mehsud, PT "emir" and the man President Pervez Musharraf and the CIA say was behind the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto last year. Mehsud has denied the charge. Under an evolving deal Mehsud has agreed to end attacks on the Pakistan army, allow economic development in South Waziristan and other tribal agencies and expel from them all foreign militants, especially Arab and Uzbek fighters with ties to Al-Qaeda. In return, the army will no longer collectively punish the Mehsuds, free 200 prisoners and start a phased withdrawal from Mehsud lands in South Waziristan. On 24 April, Baitullah Mehsud ordered the PT to end "all hostile activities" in the tribal areas and restive NWFP districts like Swat. "Obeying this order is compulsory and violators would be hanged upside down and punished publicly," he decreed. The Mardan operation was an exception, explained Maulvi Umar. It may again turn out to be the rule. On 28 April, Mehsud called off talks with the government. The army had reneged on its pledge to re-deploy forces in the tribal areas, he said. Maulvi Umar spoke darkly of "hidden hands" in Pakistan's intelligence agencies that were acting under the influence of "foreign forces". It's no secret what these forces are. "We are concerned about" the peace accord, said US government spokeswoman Dana Perino on 25 April. "What we encourage [the new Pakistani government] to do is to continue the fight against the terrorists and to not disrupt any security or military operations that are ongoing in order to prevent a safe haven for terrorists there". The Bush administration is particularly concerned that the Taliban may use peace on the Pakistan front to marshal forces for a major spring offensive against NATO in Afghanistan. There are grounds for these fears, says Khalid Aziz, a former government agent in the tribal areas who now heads a research centre in Peshawar. "You cannot deploy the army along 800 miles of the Afghan-Pakistan border. There will be gaps, which the militants will use to infiltrate. And that will lead to an increase in violence in Afghanistan". The violence is already being felt. On 27 April, Taliban gunmen breached 18 security rings to machine-gun a military parade in Kabul commemorating the 16th anniversary of the fall of the last Communist government in Afghanistan. President Hamid Karzai escaped with his life; three Afghans and three Taliban did not. The point was "to show the world that we are able to attack anywhere we want to," said an Afghan Taliban spokesman. US commanders in Afghanistan believe the hit was planned by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Taliban commander whose sanctuary is Waziristan. They want the freedom to go after him. So far the White House has rebuffed the request, unwilling to enter into a confrontation with the new Pakistan government. But with thousands reportedly massing in the tribal areas to join the fight in Afghanistan few have any illusions that American restraint will last for long. Nor over what would be the consequence if the US took unilateral military action in Pakistan. Says Aziz: "a military strike would not only destroy the peace process and everything else -- it would strain the US-Pakistan alliance to breaking point."
