Pakistan to Block NATO Lines if Strikes Persist
By DECLAN WALSH and ISMAIL KHAN
The prime minister said of Friday’s drone strike that peace could not be achieved “by unleashing senseless force.”
By DECLAN WALSH and ISMAIL KHAN
Published: November 4, 2013
LONDON — The ruling party in a northwest province of Pakistan voted
Monday to block NATO supply lines by Nov. 20 unless the United States
stops its drone strikes in the nearby tribal belt.
Multimedia
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Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician whose Tehrik-i-Insaf party
rules the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, sponsored a
resolution regarding the supply lines in the provincial parliament in
response to a C.I.A. missile strike that killed Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, on Friday.
The death of Mr. Mehsud has incited a furious reaction from Pakistani
politicians, Mr. Khan foremost among them, claiming that the targeted
killing had derailed incipient peace talks with the Taliban.
But Mr. Khan’s resolution stopped short of imposing an immediate
blockade. Setting the Nov. 20 deadline was a means of building pressure
on the Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to end American drone
strikes, while buying time to avoid a tricky confrontation with Mr.
Sharif’s administration, which does not favor blocking NATO lines.
In his first public remarks since Friday’s lethal drone strike, Mr.
Sharif said Monday that peace could not be achieved in Pakistan “by
unleashing senseless force.”
Unusually, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan backed Pakistan’s
protests, saying that the American strike “took place at an unsuitable
time.” He told an American congressional delegation in Kabul on Sunday
that he hoped the peace process would not suffer as a result.
Mr. Khan has led the tide of outrage in Pakistan since Friday, making
heated accusations of American sabotage of the peace process, and
threatening to cut the NATO lines unless the drone campaign ends.
The United States, having weathered years of Pakistani criticism over
the drone campaign, is unlikely to accede to his demand, although the
pace of drone strikes has already dropped sharply this year.
Mr. Khan’s threat contains one irony: Peshawar residents say that much
of the NATO traffic through the northwest is now headed out of
Afghanistan, not into the country, in preparation for the withdrawal of
Western combat troops by the end of 2014.
If Mr. Khan were to cut those routes, he would be slowing the withdrawal
of American troops – a withdrawal that he has demanded for years,
citing the American presence in the region as a cardinal factor in
fueling Islamist militancy inside Pakistan.
Critics point out that Mr. Khan has financial levers at his disposal to
punish the United States, too. Foreign donors, including the United
States, will provide about development assistance of about $325 million
this year, or about 30 percent of the province’s budget.
But in an interview with the newspaper Dawn published on Monday, the
provincial finance minister, Sirajul Haq, ruled out sending that money
back. “We don’t want to fight war with them,” said Mr. Haq, who is the
provincial leader of the religious Jamaat e Islami party. “The
government will continue to honor its commitments with international
donors.”
The drones issue also contains potential financial stakes for Mr.
Sharif’s federal government. During a trip to Washington last month,
when Mr. Sharif met President Obama, the State Department said it was releasing $1.6 billion in aid that had been frozen during a previous confrontation, and would provide another $1 billion this coming year.
The Taliban leadership, meanwhile, is meeting at an undisclosed location
in North Waziristan to choose a successor to Mr. Mehsud. A rival
commander named Khan Said is the favorite, but no final decision has
been made. The groups said Sunday that Asmatullah Shaheen Bhittani, the
head of their governing council, would lead the Taliban until a
replacement was chosen.
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