Pakistan’s Leaders Try New Approach to Militants

By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Faced with a sharp escalation of suicide bombing in urban areas, the leaders of Pakistan’s new coalition government say they will negotiate with the militants believed to be orchestrating the attacks, and would use the military only as a last resort.

That talk has alarmed American officials, who fear it will mean a softening stance against the militants just as President Pervez Musharraf, an ally in the war on terror, has given the Bush administration a freer hand to strike at them using unmanned Predator drones.

Many Pakistanis, however, are convinced the surge in suicide bombings — 17 in the first 10 weeks of 2008 — is in direct retaliation for three such Predator strikes since the beginning of the year. The spike in attacks, combined with Mr. Musharraf’s crushing defeat in February elections, has brought a new mood in Pakistan: that there should be a change from his American-backed policies.

It is this atmosphere that the leaders of Pakistan’s new government coalition — Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan People’s Party, and Nawaz, Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N — want to capitalize on. Speaking in separate interviews, the two men sought to repackage the conflict in a more palatable way for Pakistanis, and to strike a more independent stance from Washington.

Though short on details, they said they were determined to set a different course from President Musharraf, who received generous military financial help of more than $10 billion from Washington for his support.

“We are dealing with our own people,” said Mr. Sharif, who was twice Prime Minister of Pakistan in the 1990s. “We will deal with them very sensibly. And when you have a problem in your own family, you don’t kill your own family.

“You sit and talk,” he added. “After all, Britain also got the solution of the problem of Ireland. So what’s the harm in conducting negotiations.”

For his part, Mr. Zardari said: “Obviously what they have been doing for the last eight years has not been working. Even a fool knows that.”

The war against the insurgents had to be redefined, he said, as “Pakistan’s war” for a public that has come to resent the conflict as being pushed on the country as part of an American agenda. It should be dealt with by talks and the use of a beefed up police force rather than the army, he said.

Washington has opposed past negotiations on the grounds that short term peace deals between the militants and the Pakistani military were a sign of weakness that resulted in the militants winning time to fortify themselves.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said on a visit here last month that talks with the militants, were not helpful in the “short term.”

In general terms, according to a retired senior Pakistani general who remains close to the current military leadership, new negotiations would likely involve a ban on non-Pakistani militants — such as Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens — coming from southern Afghanistan into Pakistan in return for reduced operations by the Pakistani army in the tribal areas.

But precisely how those talks would be different from the negotiations that led to failed peace deals under Mr. Musharraf was not entirely clear, except that negotiators would represent the newly elected government rather than the military government of the last eight years.

Neither Mr. Zardari nor Mr. Sharif was specific about whom among the militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas they favored talking to. Nor was it clear what kind of formula or quid pro quo the two political leaders had in mind for talks.

Mr. Sharif, whose Islamic religious background is conservative, refused to say whether he would negotiate with Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader whom the government blames for many if not most of the recent suicide bomb attacks in Pakistan.

American and Pakistani terrorist experts have said they believe that Mr. Mehsud was behind the assassination of the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December, and that he works in tandem with Al Qaeda. “Nobody gave me any presentation on this subject,” Mr. Sharif said.

Asked who the negotiations would be held with, Mr. Sharif replied: “With all the concerned elements. I don’t think guns and bullets have so far produced any positive results.”

Any result that smacks of Pakistan ceding further control over the tribal areas is not one likely to be welcomed in Washington. The Bush administration views the tribal areas as a sanctuary for Taliban forces who cross the border into Afghanistan to fight American and NATO forces, as well as a base for Al Qaeda to plot new terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.

Pakistanis, however, have come to see the tribal areas as something entirely different: a once peaceful region where a group of militants have turned their wrath on the rest of the country as punishment for the American alliance.

Many civilians are among the 274 people killed since the beginning of the year, but the dead also include young soldiers and policemen, according to a tally by the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn. A bomb explosion at an Italian restaurant favored by foreigners in Islamabad last Saturday injured four F.B.I. agents, and underscored for Pakistanis yet again the American involvement here.

Washington may have little choice but to adjust to the new policies, a retired army brigadier, Mehmood Shah, who was in charge of security in the tribal areas, said.

Of the new Pakistani government, Mr. Shah said: “They will not like to be seen as dictated to by the United States, they would like it to be seen as ‘our war.’ ”

Mr. Shah, who met with Admiral Mullen when he was in Islamabad, said there was a popular sense in Pakistan — prevalent on television talk shows as well as the halls of parliament — that it was time to “keep a distance from the United States.”

As Pakistan’s new leaders fashion their strategy, however, they will unavoidably be dealing with programs devised by Washington to help Pakistan regain control of the lawless tribal areas. In some places, the approaches may yet dovetail.

For instance, one element of the stepped-up American aid effort is a $400 million plan to train the Frontier Corps, an under funded paramilitary force that is used to patrol the border with Afghanistan.

Mr. Sharif said he had heard about the plan, expected to begin in October, but had no details.

Mr. Zardari favored employing such a force over relying on the army, which he said was the “wrong instrument” to use against the militants. “We need to use the police force,” he said. “They had few guns, made in 1952. You have to upgrade them. You have got to give them modern technology and they will stand better than anybody else.”

Mr. Sharif, who is regarded as a nationalist — he gave the go ahead for the explosion of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb in 1998 — said he was not in favor of foreign aid. “I think frankly we should rely less on aid,” he said. “It makes us, you see, lazy. We should generate our own resources.”

Both men stressed that the new parliament, which held its first session this week, would be consulted on the strategy toward the insurgency, a sharp distinction from the go-it-alone behavior of Mr. Musharraf, who until last year served as both head of the army and president.

The two leaders have made much of the fact that they received a broad mandate in the elections last month. To that end, they said, they would revive the role of parliament.

As an example of the docile legislature, a recent report of the parliament’s committee on defense for the last four years consisted of 67 pages. The panel was apparently so short of funds, the report was published with funding from the United States Agency for International Development whose logo appears on the last page.

The only mention on the war on terror was a resolution by the committee in 2007 criticizing the United States for threatening to link the amount of aid to Pakistan to the performance of the army.

Another important distinction from the past is that the new government would not use “the same tainted network of agencies and the army who have created this” situation, said one of Mr. Sharif’s senior lieutenants, Nisar Ali Khan, who has relatives in prominent positions in the army.

“The new start won’t be with them,” he said. “It has to be a multifaceted operation with the tribal chiefs who are operating in the area.”

Both parties have long accused Pakistan’s intelligence agencies of backing militant groups even as the government has been forced to negotiate with them. Many of the groups were used to pressure India and Afghanistan, but have more recently turned their fury back on Pakistan as they have become more radicalized.

Those intelligence agencies will almost certainly have new leadership chosen by the new prime minister. Whether fresh faces at the top will mean change in the ingrained behavior of the agencies is an open question, however.

The head of the Inter Services Intelligence agency, Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj, a relative of Mr. Musharraf, is likely to be replaced in the coming months, Pakistani officials said. The head of the Intelligence Bureau, another powerful agency, Ijaz Shah, a confidant of Mr. Musharraf, resigned this week. His replacement will be named by the new prime minister, who is expected to be named on Monday by Mr. Zardari.

Mr. Zardari is not immediately eligible to become prime minister himself because he did not run for Parliament. But it is likely he will do so in the coming months and then assume the mantle.