Taliban Execute 15 Pakistan Border Troops in Revenge Killing
January 05, 2012, 10:08 PM ESTBy Anwar Shakir and Haris Anwar
(Adds Gilani tensions with military in ninth paragraph.)
Jan. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Taliban guerrillas executed 15 kidnapped members of a Pakistan paramilitary force that guards the country’s northwestern border region in a major blow to government efforts to pursue peace talks with the militants.
The Frontier Constabulary troops were killed to avenge a recent army operation that left several militants dead, including a prominent commander, Ehsanullah Ehsan, a spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, said by phone from an undisclosed location. The men were taken captive during a Dec. 22 attack on a security base, Ehsan said.
Qasim Khan, a senior official at the force’s headquarters in the city of Peshawar, confirmed the killings by telephone. A spokesman for Pakistan’s tribal region, Kifayatullah Durrani, said the men’s bodies had been found in Shawa, a town in North Waziristan, a rugged mountainous district which borders Afghanistan and is the main stronghold of militants fighting Pakistan’s army.
The deaths will hinder efforts by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s government to negotiate with militants behind attacks that the New Delhi-based South Asia Terrorism portal says have killed almost 9,000 civilians and security personnel since 2009. Gilani in October convened a conference of political leaders that advocated a conciliatory approach to the guerrillas amid public pressure to end the war.
U.S. Alliance
“These killings show that hardliners within the Taliban plan to continue their fight,” said Rashid Khan, a professor of international relations at the University of Sargodha in central Pakistan. “This is a setback to any peace efforts which were going on between Taliban and the government. The army will find it hard to justify negotiations when its soldiers are getting killed.”
The country’s main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League faction led by the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, and Imran Khan, a former cricketer and an emerging force in Pakistani politics, have called for talks with the Taliban and an end to the government’s alliance with the U.S.
Leaders of Taliban factions in Pakistan agreed at a recent meeting to end attacks that risk killing civilians and stop kidnapping for ransom while increasing their strikes against the country’s security forces, The News daily reported Jan. 3. They would also continue to support cross-border raids on NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, the report said.
Since 2004, when Pakistan began military offensives against the Taliban movement then beginning to take control of the border zone with Afghanistan, several peace deals have been negotiated, often collapsing within months.
Court Probe
Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari have been weakened by a confrontation with the army that has ruled Pakistan for half its 64 years since independence. A commission formed by Pakistan’s Supreme Court is investigating claims that Zardari sought U.S. assistance to help prevent an army coup as the military stood humiliated by the American strike that killed Osama bin Laden in a garrison town north of Islamabad in May. That account has renewed tensions between civilian leaders and army chiefs, who have backed the court probe.
Khan, who captained Pakistan’s 1992 world champion cricket team, has shed years of political irrelevance to draw crowds in excess of 100,000 people to rallies in Lahore and Karachi, his popularity spurred by a stance that Pakistan should pull out of its security pact with the U.S.
Pakistan cut its growth forecast for an economy battered by floods and militant violence to 3.6 percent from 4.2 percent for the year through June 2012. Policy makers plan to boost growth from 2.4 percent in the year ended June 30, one of Pakistan’s weakest expansions in a decade.
--Editors: Mark Williams, Patrick Harrington
To contact the reporters on this story: Anwar Shakir in Peshawar, Pakistan at ashakir1@bloomberg.net; Haris Anwar in Islamabad at hanwar2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net
