PAKISTAN - Role In The War On Terror.

Since 9/11, Pakistan has arrested more than 500 terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda and has handed them over to the US. It has arrested hundreds of Taliban militants as well. Most of these and Al-Qaeda terrorists are now held at a heavily-fortified prison in the US military base on Guantanamo Bay.

Pakistan's role in the US-led war on terror consists of these four types of co-operation: (1) providing American forces military base facilities within the country, including air and naval bases; (2) exchange of intelligence between the military establishment's powerful intelligence agency, ISI, and each of the American CIA and FBI; (3) a crackdown, by Pakistani security forces, on suspects in the country linked to Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hekmatyar's forces and their allies; and (4) military offensives against these forces' bases on the Pakistani side of the borders with Afghanistan.

However, Musharraf's critics in Washington, including many Republicans as well as the opposition Democrats, complain that Pakistan is still not doing enough in the US-led fight against terrorism. Indeed, Musharraf has maintained loose alliances with most of Pakistan's radical Islamist groups of the Sunni sect who still back both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban - the latter two now allied to the clandestine Islamist network of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (see survey of Afghanistan serialised in SBME's Vol. 47).

Musharraf refutes the US critics simply by pointing to the number of arrests made since 9/11 and heavy casualties inflicted on the terror groups as a result of repeated military offensives by the Pakistani army. The death toll from the latest military offensive against Al-Qaeda fugitives hiding near the Afghan border rose to 100 on June 23, when troops killed 30 locals in addition to dozens of foreign militants.

Brig. Mahmood Shah, the head of security in Pakistan's north-western tribal regions, said authorities were still uncertain whether any leading Al-Qaeda figures were among some 70 "foreign terrorists" who died in the operation earlier last month. The dead included Naik Mohammed, a renegade tribal leader accused of sheltering Al-Qaeda fugitives.

Naik Mohammed, 27, was killed in a missile strike on a mud-brick compound near Wana, the main town in South Waziristan. Six of his associates also died in the assault. On June 23, Brig. Shah said Mohammed was a "criminal" and had been supporting Al-Qaeda suspects for "monetary gains". Shah said the tribal leader was targeted after admitting he was behind attacks on the Pakistani army in South Waziristan and Karachi, where a senior military official earlier last month escaped an assassination attempt.

Mohammed led resistance against a Pakistani military operation in South Waziristan in March in which 120 people were killed, including 48 security forces. He later agreed to co-operate with the government and turn over foreign militants, but reneged on that promise, prompting the recent burst of fighting. "He was given enough time to change himself, but he wasted the opportunity", Brig. Shah said.

Shah said that, after Mohammed's death, local tribesmen were helping authorities in their efforts to trace and arrest Al-Qaeda figures "more willingly". Troops searched 172 homes in the area in the second half of June. They found neither militants nor weapons, he said.

The US military, pursuing Al-Qaeda on the Afghan side of the border, and Afghan officials have been pressing hard for Islamabad to step up military activity in Waziristan. The area is considered a possible hideout for Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden, though there is no hard intelligence on his whereabouts.

Government officials in Islamabad had said they believed a high-ranking Al-Qaeda operative - possibly Bin Laden's No. 2 Ayman Al-Zawahiri - was surrounded in the March attack. But no senior leaders were found. An Uzbek militant, Tahir Yuldash, was reportedly injured in the June assault, but he got away.

The Kashmir Issue & Peace Talks With India: India and Pakistan on June 27-28 held talks in New Delhi aimed at resolving their decades-old dispute over Kashmir, restarting an initiative that collapsed three years ago. The discussions were the first between the nuclear-armed neighbours on the disputed region, their number one cause of disagreement, since they came to the brink of war in 2002.

The two-day discussions between the foreign ministers were held against a backdrop of surging violence in Kashmir and the resignation of Jamali as prime minister (see above). The talks between Indian Foreign Secretary Shashank (who uses only one name), and his Pakistani counterpart, Riaz Khokhar, first focused on issues of peace and security.

On June 28, the two delegations tackled the more complex issue of ways to resolve the dispute over Kashmir, which is divided between India and Pakistan and claimed in full by both.

India proposed "military and non-military confidence building measures", which would include more people-to-people contacts across the two zones of Kashmir. The two sides also initialled an agreement on the opening of consulates in Mumbai, in western India, and Karachi, in southern Pakistan.

Last November, India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire along the Line of Control that divides Kashmir. Both sides have stopped their daily gunfire, but have jointly amassed nearly one million troops in the region. At the June 28 talks India proposed that both sides remove some of those forces.

India raised the issue of Islamist insurgents' allegedly crossing from Pakistan-controlled Kashmir into Indian territory. The Pakistani delegation said Islamabad did not allow terrorists on its territory; but it acknowledged giving political and diplomatic support to what it saw as the legitimate struggle of the Kashmiri people to end Indian occupation.

Some Islamist groups fighting in Indian-controlled Kashmir have headquarters in Pakistan. A dozen groups have been fighting the government in that portion of Kashmir since 1989 in a conflict that has killed more than 65,000 people, mostly Muslim civilians.

Hezb-ul Mujahedeen, the largest among more than a dozen Islamist groups that have been fighting security forces in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir, welcomed the talks but said there would be no pause in rebel attacks. "It is good that Pakistan and India have started talking directly about Kashmir", a spokesman for the group, Salim Hashmi, was quoted as saying from an unidentified location in Pakistan. However, he said, the "mujahedeen are continuing their activities in Indian Kashmir".

Highlighting the stakes in the talks, suspected separatist guerrillas shot and killed 12 villagers, including four children and a teenage girl, in Indian Kashmir on June 26. The victims were killed in their sleep. Two guerrillas and an Indian soldier were killed in another battle near a mosque.

The violence was intended to send a message that the aims of militants fighting Indian rule in Kashmir had to be taken into account during the talks.