BANI GALA, Pakistan: Cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan accused the United States yesterday of deliberately destroying any chance of meaningful peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban by killing the insurgency’s leader in a drone strike a week ago.
The Taliban have since rejected talks with the government and threatened a wave of revenge attacks for the death of their chief, Hakimullah Mehsud, on November 1. Khan, a popular opposition politician in the South Asian nation, said in an interview that the United States had scuppered negotiations at a time when the militants seemed to have become more open to them.
“If there was a chance of peace talks, we should have grabbed it,” he said at his sprawling estate outside Islamabad ringed by hills and neatly maintained lawns.
“The Americans basically could have taken out Hakimullah whenever they wanted. I think the timing was to sabotage the peace process. “The Americans think that if there is fighting going on here ...in our tribal belt, there is less chance of insurgents going over to the other side (Afghanistan) to fight the Americans at a time when they are withdrawing.”
Washington has long put pressure on Pakistan to do more to tackle the insurgency but the new government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, elected in May, wants to find a negotiated solution to years of violence.
Attacks against the army and civilians, however, have been on the rise since Sharif came to power, causing concern in a region already nervous about the planned withdrawal of US-led troops from Afghanistan in 2014.
Earlier this week US Secretary of State John Kerry suggested the drone attack was justifiable, while at the time saying Washington was sensitive to Pakistani concerns. Mehsud had been tentatively open to ceasefire talks with the government, but new Taliban leader Mullah Fazlullah, whose men were behind the attack on schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai last year, strongly opposes negotiations.
Khan, who became a celebrity in Pakistan and the West in the 1980s as a dashing young cricketer, is now an influential politician and a fierce opponent of US drone strikes. He said missiles fired by unmanned US aircraft in North Waziristan, a mountainous region where most militants are based, have only fuelled anti-American sentiment.
He agrees with Sharif on the need for peace talks with the Pakistan Taliban, an Al Qaeda-linked group fighting to topple the government. Khan, whose political party is now in charge of the volatile Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province bordering Afghanistan, has threatened to cut NATO supply lines through his region from Nov. 20 if US drone strikes do not end. Blocking NATO trucks at KP border checkpoints could disrupt the operations of US-led forces in Afghanistan but any decision to close supply routes through Pakistan would have to come from the central government in Islamabad.
“They (the Taliban) think ... we are the slaves of America, that the Pakistan government is taking money from the US and fighting its (America’s) war and killing its own people,” Khan said.
“Therefore they have declared jihad against the Pakistan army and Pakistani security forces. The dialogue should (take place) to take that narrative away.” Despite Sharif’s emphasis on talks, no meaningful negotiations have taken place since his election and Fazlullah’s rise could signal the start of a new period of uncertainty and violence in the unstable region.
Meanwhile, analysts said yesterday that Pakistani Taliban’s appointment of a new hardline leader opposed to peace talks and with a long history of attacks against the military could push the army into launching a fresh offensive, yesterday.
The election of Maulana Fazlullah, notorious for leading the militants’ brutal two-year rule in Pakistan’s northwestern Swat valley, is like a “red rag to a bull”, one analyst said.
It could also raise tensions with Kabul at a critical juncture as US-led forces withdraw from Afghanistan after 12 years of war.
While Kabul has long accused Islamabad of supporting the Afghan Taliban, Fazlullah has orchestrated cross-border attacks from his hideout in eastern Afghanistan, and Pakistan suspects its neighbour’s intelligence services of supporting him.Agencies
