Editorial: The News - 20 June 2013

Forwards, but cautiously

The Taliban finally have an address. It is in Doha, capital of the gulf state of Qatar and they have actually been in residence – expensively housed – for some time. Who has been picking up the tab for their extended 5-star stay is yet unknown, but it might be an agency not a million miles from Washington, DC. The formal announcement came on the Al Jazeera television channel, with the Taliban spokesman speaking in Arabic, and formal peace talks between US officials and Taliban representatives are to start today. This will be the first direct political contact between the two sides since early 2012 when the nascent peace process stumbled to yet another halt, but political imperatives are operant for both sides and talking was going to have to start at some point. It is not expected that there will be representatives of the Afghan government at the initial stages of negotiations, but it is hoped by the Americans that the process will eventually be handed over to the Karzai regime and the Peace Council that he has appointed. Given that President Karzai in not going to be the Afghan president by the end of 2014, courtesy of a general election, there is clearly a degree of urgency attached.
The conditionalities surrounding the start of formal talks appear to have softened on both sides. The Taliban have said that they do not want to harm other countries from Afghan soil and that they were willing to talk to other Afghans – which is at least a nod in the direction of plurality. For their part, the Americans have made no mention of the requirement that the Taliban cut all ties with Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and the Taliban have said nothing either, the assumption being that the matter is ‘parked’ somewhere out of the way pending further developments. In an immediate reaction, President Obama said that the agreement was a very early step and that a lot of bumps in the road were expected. Indeed so, but the road is shortening by the day and any talks need to be in sync with the military transition currently under way. Although not explicitly stated, this brings the shadowy Taliban leader Mullah Omar closer to the political mainstream than he has ever been. And while the early exchanges are going to be more symbolic than substantive, the very process itself is giving shape to the Taliban and possibly pushing them a little closer to homogeneity than is currently the case. The Taliban that are now set to talk in Doha are not the only Taliban group with a stake in the outcome. The Haqqani network is a powerful force and runs a parallel government in parts of Afghanistan; and there are other players as well. The Peace Council has members of the ‘old’ Taliban in it, men who were in the last Taliban government and may not be on the same page as the ‘new’ Taliban of a generation in front of them. The political chemistry is going to be altered by the Afghan elections, with the Karzai family perhaps no longer as dominant. External players, principally the Chinese and the Indians, are going to be watching carefully. Pakistan, obviously, has a perpetual and justified deep-rooted interest. But, despite everything, this is a step in the right direction. A little late in the day perhaps – if now why not a year or two or five or ten years ago? We will never know, but at least the world now knows where to go if it wants to talk to (some of) the Taliban.

More slaughter

Culture and tradition make the bombing of funeral processions anywhere in Pakistan catastrophically easy. If the funeral is of a high-profile person then there will be a large number of mourners, tightly packed and moving at walking pace or simply static. There are likely to be local dignitaries or prominent political figures, who might be considered the ultimate soft targets as far as the bombers are concerned. These realities were nowhere – sadly – better displayed than at the attack on a funeral procession in a village in the Mardan district on Tuesday. There were at least 34 killed and 57 injured with one of the dead being the newly elected member of the provincial assembly (MPA) Imran Mohmand, who could have been the primary target. It will not have been difficult for the suicide bomber to insinuate himself in the procession with security minimal or lax. The consequences are the slaughter of yet more innocent people in the name of who-knows-what cause. The attack has not been claimed by any organisation at the time of writing.
According to media reports Imran Mohmand had been receiving threats and his election office had been attacked during the campaign that saw him reach the provincial assembly. Two policemen along with his own private security guards were assigned to protect him but to no avail. He is the second MPA to be killed in less than a month, an unsustainable rate of attrition. The first was Farid Khan, an elected MPA from Hangu, who was killed along with his driver on June 3. Whatever the motive behind Imran Mohmand’s killing, the means by which he died is achieving the status of ubiquity that speaks of a chronic failure on the part of the police and law-enforcement agencies to protect not just elected representatives but ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. Politics may be a dirty business but it should not be a sentence of death once entered into. __________________