Wampum

Since the US press is chock-a-block with AQinPAK noise, for the usual indiscriminate value of AK and PAK, I thought it would be useful to post this snippit from Dawn's coverage of the persistent armed friction between the periphery and the center of the always problematic Pakistani (or Punjabi) Military State.

Militants have intensified attacks on the security forces since a local Taliban Shura announced last week that it had scrapped a peace agreement with the government.

As attacks on security forces mount in the troubled region, the government has convened a 45-member inter-tribal jirga in Peshawar on Thursday to launch a fresh bid to revive the now defunct September 5 [2006] peace agreement in North Waziristan.

Fata Additional Chief Secretary Javed Iqbal said that he was confident that negotiations would help revive the 10-month-old peace agreement.

"It is in the collective interest of us all. It is in their (tribal people's) interest and it is in our interest. Tribesmen are very pragmatic people and I am confident they will return to negotiations," he said.

The militants said they would not revive the peace agreement unless the government withdrew troops from checkpoints and stop military operations.

It is a local (self-described) Taliban Shura, not an Afgan Taliban group operating in the Tribal Area, and the Pakistani State has convened a jirga (assembly of tribal chiefs and other notables) as a negotiating peer with which it and the jirga can reduce armed conflict to non-critical endemic level, and pragmatism is sufficient motive for a reduction in the conflict. Further, the gravamen of the general tribal claim, distinct from that of the local (self-described) Taliban Shura, is the violation of the September 2006 peace agreement (checkpoints and operations) by the Pakistani State. Not a lot of global mumbleists there.

However, just as "Homeland Security" threat levels must rise when the domestic political tides of the RNC fall, AQ is now the proud owner of some (or all, depending on which paper and pundit are taken as gospelkoranic truth) of PAK.