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Is a Pakistan Truce Good for the United States?

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Daniel Markey, Senior Fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

May 21, 2008

Daniel Markey, a former State Department specialist on South Asia for the Policy Planning Council, has just returned from a trip to Pakistan. He says the United States should be concerned about the negotiations going on between the Pakistan army and tribal leaders because in the past, truces between the two have led to increased infiltration of terrorists into Afghanistan. This time, however, may be different. The Pakistani army seems to have moved in force to the frontier regions; further, it is negotiating with tribal leaders to give them responsibility for bringing the militants under control, instead of negotiating with the Taliban.

You've recently been in Pakistan. There are discussions going on between the new government in Pakistan and the tribal leaders, some of whom might be aligned with terrorists. Is this something the United States should be concerned about or not?

It's pretty clear that we should definitely be concerned about these talks. According to NATO commanders, as well as the U.S. government, there has been a spike in terms of cross-border infiltration from Pakistan into Afghanistan in recent weeks and months, as compared to last year. It does appear that whatever is happening on the Pakistani side of the border, it is not helping matters in Afghanistan. The kind of deal that we're seeing coming together—and it hasn't quite been finalized between the Pakistani government, and basically that means the Pakistani military with a bit of a civilian face to it—and the Mehsud tribes [in South Waziristan] is similar to the sort of deals we've seen in the past. Those had pretty much always ended poorly. They produced temporary cease-fires that haven’t done all that much to end movement into Afghanistan or to cut down on the sort of safe havens that international terrorists have enjoyed.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.