Pakistan denies granting sanctuary to the Taliban

When Taliban militant Syed Azizullah died during fighting in southern Afghanistan, his body was sent to his native Pakistan where a provincial official gave a eulogy before hundreds of Pashtun tribesmen. A flag of the Islamist militia fluttered by the grave.

Pakistan strenuously denies granting sanctuary to the Taliban, yet their cause still finds succour among local Pashtuns and Islamic hard-liners, fuelling suspicions that jihadi leaders may be plotting their campaign of violence from south-western Pakistan, with militants crossing the long, porous border to launch attacks.

Pakistan, a key US ally in the 'war on terror', denies that and says it does all it can to combat militancy.

It has deployed 80,000 troops to fight al-Qaida and local Taliban militants in its own Waziristan tribal areas further north – a suspected hiding place of Osama bin Laden – and has lost hundreds of soldiers in fighting there.

But it appears far less active in tracking down Taliban in Baluchistan province, where Azizullah was buried opposite southern Afghan regions where recent months’ surge in rebel attacks has sparked the heaviest fighting since the Taliban’s ouster from power in late 2001.

Afghan officials accuse Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, pre-9/11 supporters of the Taliban regime, of being behind the violence that has seriously shaken Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s feeble authority in a former Taliban heartland.

Western diplomats doubt there’s Pakistani state backing for the militants, but with NATO forces from Britain, Canada and the Netherlands deploying in the Afghan south and facing suicide attacks and roadside bombings almost daily, diplomatic pressure is growing on Pakistan to crack down on its side of the arid, lawless frontier.

The NATO forces say Pakistan’s security forces currently appear more concerned with stamping out ethnic Baluch tribal militants, who are disrupting crucial natural gas supplies in the province with guerrilla attacks.

“The government is forceful in FATA (federally administered tribal areas, including Waziristan) and appears to be turning a blind eye in Baluchistan,” one Islamabad-based diplomat said on condition of anonymity, due to the issue’s sensitivity. “The message is sent to the government of Pakistan that a lot more could be done.”

That message, however, is a mixed one, tempered by respect for Pakistan’s anti-terror successes against al Qaida in the past four years, arresting hundreds of militants, including key figures like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the September 11 attacks.

When the chief of staff for British forces in southern Afghanistan told The Guardian newspaper last month that Baluchistan’s capital, Quetta, was the Taliban militant campaign’s “headquarters,” the British Embassy in Pakistan swiftly moved to distance itself from the comments.

The presence of Taliban leaders in Quetta, which is heavily populated by Afghan migrants, is hard to substantiate. The clearest public sign was the arrest there last October of a Taliban spokesman, Latif Hakimi, who lived in the city with his family.

One Afghan with ties to the Taliban said that Taliban provincial commanders for southern Afghanistan spend most of their time in Quetta and have regular “shuras” or councils to discuss the insurgency with district commanders.

The Afghan, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing concerns for his safety, said that he had attended a shura two months ago in the city, along with 120 Taliban, and that three young men had volunteered for “suicide attacks against infidels”.

He also claimed the Taliban hold training camps in Quetta to train militants on how to make and plant bombs.

Afghan officials enraged Pakistan by publicising similar allegations in February, when Karzai handed Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf a dossier on the reported whereabouts in Pakistan of alleged terror training camps and Taliban and al Qaida suspects.

Pakistan said most of the information was wrong or old and did not lead to any significant arrests.

“As far as we are concerned, there are no Taliban leaders there (in Quetta),” said Pakistan’s army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan. “If anyone has actionable intelligence, they should provide it and we will act on it.”

A second Western diplomat said the possibility that Taliban leaders are in Quetta did not mean it was their hub of operations for southern Afghanistan, where more than 400 people have died in fighting in three weeks, many in US air strikes.

“We can’t conclude that a Taliban shura in Quetta is running the campaign in Afghanistan. If you can put in a force big enough to get 80 killed in Kandahar, the simplest explanation is that they are running their campaign there,” he said. Like the first diplomat, he requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“Maybe they (Taliban leaders) are in Pakistan, maybe they’re in Afghanistan. Most likely they keep moving around,” he said. “Neither government controls the (border) area.”

But the open, pro-Taliban sympathies of Pashtun tribesmen and religious hard-liners – illustrated at the May 23 funeral of Syed Azizullah – inspire little confidence in Pakistan government declarations that it does all it can to curb Taliban militancy.

Among the speakers at his funeral at the village of Bagarzai, 50km north of Quetta, was Maulana Abdul Bari, public health engineering minister in Baluchistan’s provincial government.

He extolled Azizullah for “fighting in the way of Allah” and “against infidel forces in Afghanistan”, according to local businessman Asghar Khan, who said he heard the eulogy.

Information Minister Matiullah Agha also attended. Both are members of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, a hard-line Islamic party that is the dominant partner a coalition government in Baluchistan, the poorest of Pakistan’s four provinces.

Maulvi Noor Mohammed, a JUI lawaker, said it was every Muslim’s duty to support the Taliban in fighting the US and its allies in Afghanistan, although the party’s itself wasn’t sending people to fight and offered the militants only moral and political backing.

Asked why JUI leaders attended the funeral of Azizullah, who reportedly died in a US air strike on a village in Kandahar province that killed dozens of militants, Mohammed explained: “He was a local person, he was martyred by infidels, and he was a Muslim brother.”