Pakistan's Taliban: ''Too much for too little''

THERE is no deadlock, Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan had told the country regarding talks with the outlawed TTP.

There is a deadlock, the TTP emissaries and a member of its negotiating committee had claimed.

Now, the TTP leadership has cancelled its month-old ceasefire and the future of the government-TTP dialogue has been plunged into chaos and uncertainty. Immediately, the TTP negotiating committee has talked of trying to keep the talks alive and restoring the ceasefire, but it appears difficult that the two can be attempted at the same time because talks amidst violence had previously been ruled out by the government, and rightly so. The government has already conceded far too much in return for far too little, the latest case in point being the statement made by new KP governor Sardar Mehtab Ahmad Khan on Tuesday.

Swearing-in ceremonies and initial comments to the media are supposed to be fairly innocuous affairs. But KP’s newest governor, Mehtab Khan, chose to wade straight into controversy by mooting the idea of a general amnesty for the Taliban. According to Governor Khan, many militants would apparently prefer to return to mainstream society and lead peaceful lives, but could not do so because the path to their return is blocked. Quite how Mr Khan arrived at that conclusion is problematic enough. But it is what the KP governor went on to recommend that is truly extraordinary: a general amnesty for militants. The questions that Mr Khan’s suggestion raise are many, and grave. For one, as the senior-most representative of the federation in KP, was the governor speaking in his personal capacity or inadvertently stating the government’s eventual policy? Surely, it could not have been uttered in his personal capacity, but then ought the federal government not to distance itself from the governor’s recommendation or censure the governor or clarify the government’s position on the matter?

The troubling part of an amnesty is that it flows logically from the prisoner releases — not even swaps, just unilateral releases — that the government has engineered in recent weeks. If militancy suspects in state custody can be handed back to the TTP, then why not an amnesty for the individuals who are already roaming free? It also works in the other direction: if those already free can get an amnesty, then even the most hardline of militants convicted by the court and serving their sentences in prison could also be set free. Follow through the logic of Mr Khan’s amnesty suggestion and it would appear that there is no one really whose capture the state ought to seek for perpetrating or planning violence against state and society. Is that really what the PML-N had in mind when it opted to give dialogue one last chance? Is the TTP ceasefire withdrawal a way to put yet more pressure on a wilting government?