Just one day after Pakistani officials told the Wall Street Journal that negotiations with the Taliban in South Waziristan http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2008/06/pakistan_to_suspend_... target=_blank>were put on hold, the governor of the Northwest Frontier Province said that negotiations are continuing. In fact, the governor expects that a deal will be completed in a matter of weeks.
The latest draft copy of the peace agreement was passed on to Pakistan's Daily Times. As the current draft stands, the Pakistani Army will withdraw from South Waziristan once Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud releases the scores of regular and paramilitary troops who were captured in 2007 and 2008. There is one major sticking point in the negotiations. The U.S. and NATO allies are pushing Pakistan to halt the continued cross-border attacks into Afghanistan. The Taliban said they do not recognize the existing border and will not halt strikes. Meanwhile, the Taliban and al Qaeda train fighters and suicide bombers to strike in Afghanistan and the West.
To really understand Pakistan's tribal areas, particularly North and South Waziristan, read Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's report about a 14-year-old Pakistani boy who was sent to a madrassa, or religious school, in South Waziristan. The boy, named Shakirullah, was brainwashed by the school's radical clerics to conduct a suicide attack against U.S. forces based in Khost province, Afghanistan. Afghan soldiers stopped the boy and arrested him:
Shakirullah identifies a teacher at the madrassa named Azizullah as the person who transported him across the border into Afghanistan's Khost Province, urging him to blow himself up. He says Azizullah also gave him an explosives-laden vest and instructed him to detonate the device when he got close to a group of U.S. soldiers.
"They told me to go to Afghanistan and carry out a suicide attack and that I would come back," Shakirullah says. "[Azizullah] didn't allow me to inform my family. I was forced to come [to Afghanistan]. When I finished [studying] the Koran, they told me, 'Now you carry out a suicide attack and you will come back to visit your parents.' Then I was brought to Afghanistan."
This madrassa is still in operation, and the Pakistani government has shut down the program to monitor madrassa. With the peace deal, these madrassa will only flourish.
