United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

Pakistan's prime minister has reacted angrily to a threat from the president of Afghanistan that he had a "right of self-defense" to send troops into Pakistan, BBC News reported Monday.[1] -- The New York Times (which disapproves of the Pakistani government's recent peace accords with Islamist militants in the predominantly Pashtun autonomous tribal regions along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, especially in South Waziristan) quoted extensively from Hamid Karzai's remarks, made at a press conference in Kabul: "'And the other fellow, Pakistani Mullah Omar, should know the same,' Mr. Karzai said. 'This is a two-way road in this case, and Afghans are good at the two-way-road journey. We will complete the journey and we will get them and we will defeat them. We will avenge all that they have done to Afghanistan for the past so many years. Today’s Afghanistan is not yesterday’s silent Afghanistan. We have a voice, tools, and bravery as well.”[2] -- Pakistan's Daily Times said "local Taliban" threatened that they would stage "intensifying attacks" inside Afghanistan if Afghan troops invaded Pakistan.[3] -- President Karzai is dancing to an American tune: An U.S. general who left Aghanistan two weeks ago after 16 months there said in a recent Pentagon news conference that "Attacks increased by 50 percent in April in Afghanistan’s eastern region, as a spreading Taliban insurgency in Pakistan fuelled a surge in violence," and called for "pressure on the insurgents," the Daily Times noted in a separate piece.[4] -- On Sunday, the Los Angeles Times devoted a piece to growing American concern about the deals being made with militants in the extraordinarily complex tribal areas.[5] -- Baitullah Mahsud is described as a "notorious commander" masterminding this process. -- "The previously reclusive Mahsud last month summoned Pakistani journalists to a news conference at his tribal redoubt, in which he asserted that jihad against the U.S. in Afghanistan remained a praiseworthy aim," Laura King wrote. -- Behind discussions in "the tribal jirgas, the traditional decision-making forums in which endless cups of sweet tea mask sometimes-bitter disagreements," the U.S. national security state claims to see the hand of "Al Qaeda," King said. -- Pressure from the U.S. has led Pakistan to introduce new border-respecting clauses in a draft agreement with Baitullah Mahsud's tribe, Internews reported.[6] ...

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said Pakistan did not interfere with other countries and would not allow any interference in its affairs.

His warning came after Afghan President Hamid Karzai threatened to send troops over the border into Pakistan to confront militants based there.

He said his nation had the right to retaliate in "self-defense" when militants crossed over from Pakistan.

But Mr. Gilani responded that the border between their two countries was too long to police.

"Neither do we interfere in anyone else's matters, nor will we allow anyone to interfere in our territorial limits and our affairs," Mr. Gilani told the Associated Press news agency.

"We want a stable Afghanistan. It is in our interest. How can we go to destabilize our brotherly country?"

Mr. Karzai's remarks came two days after Taliban fighters attacked an Afghan jail, freeing some 900 inmates, including 350 Taliban members.

The Afghan president has long pleaded for Pakistan and international forces to confront militants in Pakistan but has never before threatened to send troops over the border.

He said: "Afghanistan has the right of self-defense. When they cross the territory from Pakistan to come and kill Afghans and to kill coalition troops it exactly gives us the right to go back and do the same."

Mr. Karzai warned he was prepared to seek out Taliban leaders wherever they were, specifically naming Baitullah Mehsud, who is based in South Waziristan, Pakistan.

"Baitullah Mehsud should know that we will go after him now and hit him in his house," Mr. Karzai said, adding that Taliban leader Mullah Omar could expect the same.

Correspondents say it is the strongest language yet from Mr. Karzai on his neighbor.

Some 20 escapees from Kandahar prison have been recaptured in the manhunt by Afghan and international troops, according to Afghan officials.

NATO said at least 17 insurgents had been killed but did not confirm whether any fugitives from the jail were among the dead.

A former Taliban stronghold, Kandahar is one of the key battlegrounds in the insurgency against Afghanistan's government and troops from NATO and a U.S.-led coalition.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan threatened on Sunday to send soldiers into Pakistan to fight militant groups operating in the border areas to attack Afghanistan. His comments, made at a news conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, are likely to worsen tensions between the countries, just days after American forces in Afghanistan killed 11 Pakistani soldiers on the border while pursuing militants.

“If these people in Pakistan give themselves the right to come and fight in Afghanistan, as was continuing for the last 30 years, so Afghanistan has the right to cross the border and destroy terrorist nests, spying, extremism, and killing, in order to defend itself, its schools, its peoples, and its life,” Mr. Karzai said.

“When they cross the territory from Pakistan to come and kill Afghans and kill coalition troops, it exactly gives us the right to go back and do the same,” he said.

Mr. Karzai repeated that he regarded the Pakistani government as a friendly government, but he urged it to join Afghanistan and allied nations to fight those who wanted to destabilize both countries, and to “cut the hand” that is feeding the militants.

The prime minister of Pakistan, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said the border was too long to prevent people from crossing, “even if Pakistan puts its entire army along the border.”

“Neither do we interfere in anyone else’s matters, nor will we allow anyone to interfere in our territorial limits and our affairs,” the Associated Press quoted Mr. Gilani as having said.

Mr. Karzai named several militant leaders, including Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani who has sent scores of fighters and suicide bombers to Afghanistan, and Maulana Fazlullah, a firebrand militant leader from the Swat Valley. Both men have recently negotiated peace deals with the Pakistani government, but vowed to continue waging jihad in Afghanistan.

“Baitullah Mehsud should know that we will go after him now and hit him in his house,” Mr. Karzai said.

The president also taunted the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Omar, calling him a Pakistani, since he has been based in this country since fleeing Afghanistan in 2001.

“And the other fellow, Pakistani Mullah Omar, should know the same,” Mr. Karzai said. “This is a two-way road in this case, and Afghans are good at the two-way-road journey. We will complete the journey and we will get them and we will defeat them. We will avenge all that they have done to Afghanistan for the past so many years.”

“Today’s Afghanistan is not yesterday’s silent Afghanistan,” he warned. “We have a voice, tools, and bravery as well.”

Mr. Karzai’s comments came two days after Taliban fighters assaulted the main prison in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, blowing up the mud walls, killing 15 guards and freeing about 1,200 inmates. It is not known if the fighters received assistance from outside Afghanistan.

Mr. Karzai has adopted a tougher stance in recent months toward Pakistan and even toward foreign allies like the United States and Britain, a shift that analysts say is driven by political concerns at home, with presidential elections due next year.

He says Pakistan has been giving sanctuary to militants for several years and his frustration has grown as the threat has grown. He has often accused the premier Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, of training and assisting militant groups, to undermine his government and maintain a friendly proxy force for the day that United States and NATO troops withdraw from Afghanistan.

His relations with the president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, have deteriorated over the years, amid mutual recriminations that the other side was not doing enough to curb terrorism. Mr. Musharraf always denied that the Taliban was operating from Pakistani territory and accused Mr. Karzai of failing to put his own country in order.

Mr. Karzai has welcomed the electoral victories of the secular, democratic parties in Pakistan, since he had longstanding good relations with the late Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan Peoples Party, and in particular with another coalition partner, the Awami National Party.

In a recent interview, Mr. Karzai expressed optimism that relations between the countries would improve under the new government, in particular because of its opposition to militant Islamism.

Yet Afghanistan has watched Pakistan’s peace deals with militant groups with concern and has protested that cross-border infiltration has already increased.

In southern Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai said, British commanders reported that 70 percent of the Taliban fighters killed in recent fighting in the Garmser district were from Pakistan, and 60 percent were Pakistanis.

Mr. Karzai complained that the Pashtuns, the ethnic group that lives on both sides of the border, have been used by the Inter-Services Intelligence and have suffered the most at the hands of the militants. Mr. Karzai is an ethnic Pashtun and spoke out for his fellow tribesmen in Pakistan as well as in his own country.

The militants “have been trained against the Pashtuns of Pakistan and against the people of Afghanistan, and their jobs are to burn Pashtun schools in Pakistan, not to allow their girls to get educated, and kill the Pashtun tribal chiefs,” Mr. Karzai said.

“This is the duty of Afghanistan to rescue the Pashtuns in Pakistan from this cruelty and terror,” he said. “This is the duty of Afghanistan to defend itself and defend their brothers, sisters and sons on the other side.”

KHAR -- Local Taliban have warned of intensifying attacks inside Afghanistan if Afghan forces attack Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. Reacting to a statement by the Afghan president threatening attacks against Taliban in Pakistan, Tehreek-e-Taliban spokesman told *Daily Times* it was aimed at “averting the world’s attention from their defeat”.

** General McNeill says ‘greatest risk from collusion of indigenous insurgents, NWFP terrorists’ -- Says Afghan spike ‘directly attributable to lack of pressure on other side of border’&nbnsp;**

LAHORE, Pakistan -- Attacks increased by 50 percent in April in Afghanistan’s eastern region, as a spreading Taliban insurgency in Pakistan fuelled a surge in violence, the outgoing U.S. commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan has claimed.

At a Pentagon news conference, Gen. Dan K. McNeill, who left Afghanistan on June 3 after 16 months of command in the country, said that stabilizing Afghanistan would be impossible without a more robust military campaign against insurgents in Pakistan.

Collusion: “The greatest risk is the possibility of collusion between the insurgents who are indigenous to that region and the more intractable, the more extreme terrorists who are taking up residence there in the NWFP,” he said.

Increase: McNeill said that the 50 percent increase in attacks in eastern Afghanistan in April compared with the same month last year was “directly attributable to the lack of pressure on the other side of the border.”

“What’s missing is action to keep pressure on the insurgents,” he said. For example, Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Kayani has failed to agree to attend a meeting between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the U.S. in four months.

McNeill also criticized a U.S.-funded program to train and equip Pakistan’s Frontier Corps (FC), questioning the effectiveness and loyalty of the tribally recruited guards.

** American and NATO officials fear that truce negotiations in tribal areas will result in more violence in Afghanistan. **

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- The jirgas, or traditional tribal gatherings, continue late into the night.

And every few weeks, from some remote corner of Pakistan's untamed frontier region, word filters out: Another truce has been struck between the government and a local warlord who commands a band of pro-Taliban fighters.

For nearly two months, Pakistan's new government has been engaged in intensive negotiations with Islamic militants who use the rugged tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan as both a sanctuary and a springboard for attacks.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization and U.S. officials have voiced increasing concern over the nature and scope of such negotiations and the resulting agreements. Under them, militant factions have received significant concessions, including the release of dozens of prisoners and the granting of what is in effect amnesty to fugitive commanders who were on most-wanted lists.

The truces, analysts and officials say, reflect Pakistan's determination to protect its own interests, even as it seeks to reassure the United States that it remains a committed ally in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Of paramount importance to the new government is halting suicide bombings and other attacks in Pakistan. Far less urgency is accorded to stemming the flow of fighters and weapons into Afghanistan, as the West wants Pakistan to do.

NATO says it has tracked a notable increase in cross-border insurgent attacks in Afghanistan since the truce negotiations began.

The state of hair-trigger tension along the frontier was evident in a chaotic clash last week in which Pakistan says 11 of its troops were killed by American airstrikes. The U.S. military, which did not acknowledge responsibility for the deaths, released video that it said showed the strikes were in response to insurgent fire directed at U.S.-backed Afghan forces. The U.S. military is investigating the incident.

Despite steady activity, the new government's effort to make deals with militants is still in its nascent stages.

No formal accord has been signed yet with the main umbrella group of the Pakistani Taliban, led by a notorious commander named Baitullah Mahsud, based in the South Waziristan tribal agency. Government forces, though, have been giving his fighters a wide berth under informal understandings already reported to be in place.

"The army is never in his territory. When they claim they are, it is only public relations," said retired Brig. Gen. Mahmood Shah, now a Peshawar-based analyst.

In a symbol of his wider influence, Mahsud has signed off on a handful of pacts formalized elsewhere in the tribal areas and in Pakistan's volatile northwest, according to officials familiar with the negotiations.

Mahsud, who is blamed by Pakistani authorities for attacks, including the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, has declared that his fighters would not feel bound to refrain from attacking Western troops in Afghanistan, even if they stopped striking Pakistani targets.

The previously reclusive Mahsud last month summoned Pakistani journalists to a news conference at his tribal redoubt, in which he asserted that jihad against the U.S. in Afghanistan remained a praiseworthy aim.

Longtime observers of the conflict in the tribal areas note a striking disconnect between U.S. policy aims in Pakistan and the sentiments of ordinary Pakistanis, particularly in the northwest, where the militancy has its deepest roots.

"Overall, the perception is that this is a war we should not be fighting," said Rustum Shah Mohmand, a former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan. "Are we supposed to let our own territory burn because NATO would be unhappy if we make peace arrangements there?"

In the last year, Pakistan suffered a series of suicide attacks by Islamic militants, at a pace that averaged more than one a week. The attacks were often aimed at government and security installations, but killed and wounded hundreds of civilians as well.

The pervasive sense of insecurity in cities and towns eroded the already flagging popularity of U.S.-backed President Pervez Musharraf. Pakistan's military campaign against Islamic militants, with its steady toll of troop casualties and the occasional humiliating mass surrender of government forces, also sapped army morale.

Since parliamentary elections in February brought the new ruling coalition to power, suicide bombings have trailed off but not halted. This month, a bomb exploded outside the Danish Embassy in the capital, Islamabad, killing six people. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility.

Pakistan's new government says that the truce overtures are aimed at homegrown groups, known as local Taliban, and only those who are willing to lay down their weapons.

But some militant commanders who already have reached agreements with the government are believed to have links with Al Qaeda, or at least are sympathetic to their aims.

One of them is Maulana Qazi Fazlullah, whose fighters in the North-West Frontier Province's Swat Valley, 100 miles north of Islamabad, agreed last month to halt attacks against government troops in exchange for the imposition of Sharia, or Islamic law, in the scenic valley, with Islamic clerics and scholars advising civil judges.

In many areas, observers and analysts say, army commanders are negotiating directly with the militants. Tribal elders are involved in the process to a degree, they say, but no longer serve as crucial intermediaries and arbiters.

"The tribal structure has really broken down," said Afrasiab Khattak, a leader of the secular Awami National Party that won elections in the North-West Frontier Province this year.

Still, the truces are being discussed and debated in the tribal jirgas, the traditional decision-making forums in which endless cups of sweet tea mask sometimes-bitter disagreements.

Those familiar with the proceedings say heated arguments, though usually couched in indirect and respectful language, have broken out over whether the militants or the Pakistani army can be trusted to stick to the terms of any agreement. Throughout the tribal areas, villagers have suffered at the hands of both.

Pashtun tribes are the overwhelming majority in the border belt, though a minority in the country as a whole. Marshaling a powerful sense of historic grievance, Khattak's party has tapped into Pashtun nationalist sentiment that it hopes may supplant Islamist militancy.

In a symbolic but freighted gesture, the party, which is also a partner in the new central government, recently secured a pledge to change the name of the North-West Frontier Province, a British colonial holdover, to Pashtunkhwa, or the place of the Pashtuns.

Many longtime observers of the tribal areas, however, believe there is no sophisticated strategic planning by the central coalition government, which is already splintered after only two months in office. There are particularly loud complaints about Rehman Malik, the ranking Interior Ministry official who has been given broad authority in dealings with the militants.

"He doesn't even understand Pashtu," scoffed Khalid Aziz, a former provincial chief secretary who runs a think tank in Peshawar. "What insights can he offer about this area, and this situation, which is so complex?"

Those complexities are deepened by the fact that dealings with the semi-autonomous tribal areas are supposed to come under the purview of the president, a post still held by Musharraf.

His foes are seeking to strip him of most of his powers, but in the meantime, the ill-defined lines of authority are creating paralysis.

Some officials say it may be too late to stop militancy from encroaching on Peshawar, the provincial capital.

"The writ of the state has grown very weak, and warlordism has filled the vacuum," Khattak said. "With these truces or without them, this will not be an easy process to reverse."

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- In a move ostensibly aimed at easing U.S. pressure, the Pakistan government has introduced a new clause to a draft peace agreement for South Waziristan to stop tribal militants from cross-border activities, it has been learned.

The revised draft agreement says the Mahsud tribe, including the Taliban, would not violate Pakistani and Islamic laws “within the country, across the border, and abroad.”

“We the Mahsud tribe, including the Taliban, will not violate the law of Islam and Pakistan within the country, across the border, and abroad,” a carefully structured new clause to the proposed peace agreement said.

The head of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mahsud, told reporters last month that Islam did not recognize borders and waging jihad against foreign occupation forces was obligatory upon all Muslims.

The second new clause requires the Mahsud tribe to cough up Rs5 million within two months of signing the peace agreement as payback for the losses suffered by the government both in terms of men and material.

A senior government official said the amount would be used to rebuild the Sara Rogha Fort. Hundreds of militants had attacked the British-era fort on the night of January 16, killing 22 paramilitary soldiers and taking several others hostage.

The only fort located inside the inhospitable Mahsud territory was later dynamited and virtually razed to the ground.