Pakistan inks truce deal with militants in NW area

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Pakistan agreed Monday to suspend military offensives and impose Islamic law in part of the restive northwest, making a gesture it hopes will help calm the Taliban insurgency while rejecting Washington’s call for tougher measures against militants.

A U.S. defense official called the deal “a negative development,” and some Pakistani experts expressed skepticism that the truce would decrease violence. One human rights activist said the accord was “a great surrender” to militants.

Elsewhere in the northwest, missiles fired by a suspected U.S. spy plane killed 30 people in a house used by an extremist commander, witnesses said. It was the deadliest of almost three dozen apparent American attacks on al-Qaida and Taliban targets in the semiautonomous tribal lands close to the Afghan border since last year.

Monday’s peace agreement applies to the Malakand region, which includes the former tourist destination of the Swat Valley, where extremists have gained sway by beheading people, burning girls’ schools and attacking security forces since a similar agreement broke down in August.

U.S. officials complained the earlier accord allowed militants to regroup and rearm and urged Pakistan’s government to concentrate on military solutions to the insurgency in the rugged frontier region, where al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding.

The new agreement intensified that unease.

“It is hard to view this as anything other than a negative development,” a senior Defense Department official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of relations with Pakistan and because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

A White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said later, “We have seen the press reports and are in touch with the government of Pakistan about the ongoing situation in Swat.”

Speaking in India, President Barack Obama’s special envoy for the region, Richard Holbrooke, did not directly address Pakistan’s peace effort in Malakand. But he said the rise of the Taliban in Swat was a reminder that the U.S., Pakistan and India face an “an enemy which poses direct threats to our leadership, our capitals and our people.”