Pakistan regime, military at odds

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan's newly elected government is clashing with the country's powerful military over peace deals that the military has secretly initiated with Islamic militants allied with al-Qaida along the country's border with Afghanistan.

Former Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao said the army and the Inter-Services Intelligence agency began negotiations with tribes and militants in the tribal areas along the Afghan border during a power vacuum between U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf's regime and opposition parties that took over parliament in late March.

"They were started by the agencies and the army in the caretaker period," said Sherpao, who twice served as chief minister of the North West Frontier Province and who, as interior minister, ran Pakistan's counterterrorism policy in the Musharraf government until last November. "The agreements are either done by the army or the governor. The federal government doesn't have anything to do with it."

When news of a new peace initiative emerged last week in South Waziristan, the most volatile part of Pakistan's tribal border region with Afghanistan, many thought it was a product of opposition parties' triumph in the February parliamentary election.

However, according to a senior Pakistani official, the government learned of the military's initiative only after it took power, and it has since tried to rein in the army's plan, which would have pulled out Pakistani troops and left the local tribes to police the area.

The apparent rift is the first public hint of tension between Pakistan's elected leaders and the military, which ran the country from October 1999 until the elections in February.

This week, Baitullah Mehsud, the Waziristan warlord who leads Pakistan's version of the Taliban, broke off the talks when negotiators told him that the army wouldn't retreat.

Publicly, the army has said only that it's briefed the incoming political leaders on their options. "The government is negotiating. So far we don't know the outcome," Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the army spokesman, said.

Zahid Khan, a senior member of the Awami National Party, a nationalist party that won the elections in the North West Frontier Province and leads the provincial government, said his administration isn't involved in the negotiations with militants in the tribal belt.

"The tribal areas come under the governor and central government. We don't know anything about those," Khan said.

The U.S. and Afghanistan said the Pakistan army's withdrawal after earlier accords let Afghan and Pakistani Taliban use Waziristan to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan and gave al-Qaida a sanctuary in which to regroup.