US quiet on Pakistan peace deal with Taliban

[February 18, 2009]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- While human rights groups and European officials criticize Pakistan's truce with Taliban fighters, the United States has had little to say.

The muted response Tuesday was a sign -- the second in two weeks -- of an Obama administration wary about weakening an already fragile government in Islamabad. The U.S. needs that government in the fight against Islamic militants, including the Taliban, that are using Pakistan to stage attacks on U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has sent a hard-line cleric to the violent Swat Valley to negotiate with the Taliban. The cleric is pressing militants to give up their arms to honor a pact that imposes Islamic law and suspends a military offensive in Swat and nearby areas. Swat is not far from the semiautonomous tribal regions where al-Qaida and Taliban long have had strongholds.

British and NATO officials have expressed misgivings about a move they said could give extremists a haven in Pakistan.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, however, was cautious when speaking to reporters in Japan. She said Pakistan's efforts still needed to be "thoroughly understood" before she could comment.

"Obviously, we believe that the activity by the extremists in Pakistan poses a direct threat to the government of Pakistan as well as to the security of the United States, Afghanistan and a number of other nations," Clinton said.

The United States relies on nuclear-armed Pakistan to fight resurgent extremists operating along the Afghan-Pakistan border, and is eager to strengthen a Washington-backed government facing high inflation, a sinking currency, widespread poverty and a violent insurgency by Islamic militants.

Earlier this month, Clinton also was reticent when asked about Pakistan's release from house arrest of Abdul Qadeer Khan, a scientist whose smuggling operation shipped nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

The Obama administration is conducting South Asia policy reviews and has appointed Richard Holbrooke, who settled ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as a special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist with the RAND Corporation, said, "The real reason for being silent is there's really no good answer" yet in Washington for what is happening in Pakistan.

"Everyone is skeptical that this is going to work," Fair said.

At the State Department, spokesman Gordon Duguid, pressed by reporters for the administration's view of the truce, would say only that U.S. diplomats in Islamabad are "fully engaged" with the Pakistani government "to find out exactly what their strategy is."

"We'll wait and see what their fuller explanation is for us," he said.

Others have been more critical.

Ali Dayan Hasan, senior South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, said peace deals between Pakistan and the Taliban "tend to fail and, in the interim, they tend to strengthen highly regressive, human rights-abusing forces."

The Pakistani Embassy in Washington said troops would remain "until the militant threat was completely over" and the deal is "conditioned on peace and laying down of arms by militants."

[Associated Press; By FOSTER KLUG]

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