By Ahsan Waheed
Don’t, for a moment, doubt it. The recent ‘routine and scheduled’ visit of US Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary, Richard Boucher, to Islamabad just when the new government was looking to find its footing, did not go down at all well in Pakistan. In fact, it was taken grossly remiss by both today’s much better informed general public and the media in its independent capacity.
Each saw it as a tactless effort to browbeat Pakistan’s political establishment into submission on the questionable solution of persisting with the military solution, rather than a dialogue with the Taliban towards which Pakistan’s coalescing parties seem more inclined. It was as if the panic button had been pushed with the fall from grace of President Pervez Musharraf, pending his having to leave the driving seat.
This notwithstanding, at a press conference Negroponte said, “I don’t understand how anybody could hold talks with violent extremists.” But he did concede, there were two types of extremists, those who are irreconcilable and those who could reconcile to the idea of democracy, while he reassured that US stood committed to working with Pakistan’s leaders on a bilateral basis on this.
This last could be doubted if one were to take into account the Washington Post report on escalated US air strikes against Al Qaeda fighters in the tribal areas suggesting they had been geared to inflict as much damage as possible on the militants as Islamabad’s support could be found waning in the post-Musharraf scenario. But Negroponte denied this as “misinformation and incorrect facts”.
The Bush administration might look to closely examining the photograph of the local Taliban, or the tribal Pushtun, published on the front page of the Monday March 31 edition of the Daily Times. Their fiercely independent nature and defiant resolve are flawlessly depicted. And, it suffices to explain why Pakistan’s ruling coalition prefers to cut a peace deal with the Taliban, who are all said and done of its own people, rather than pursuing the military option.