Any how, the UN sanctions don’t guarantee that the fund and arms flow will stop to the TTP. Nor will it affect the travel plans of TTP leaders when they are being courted for talks in places far removed from the Af-Pak region in the belief that a role to the TTP in the peace plan would make Kabul breath with ease. The fact of the matter is TTP is not dependent on conventional markets and manufacturers for its arms. Its funds are not deposited in the Swiss banks either.
If the sanction is aimed at taming TTP as a parallel diplomatic effort to the dialogue process, it may yield no more than gifting a talking point to Pakistan government. Because the ‘talks’ have not stood in the way of TTP in drawing blood and more blood every day in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well.
Taliban greeted the UN sanctions with bomb and gun attacks in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan on July 29 claimed 21 lives. One of the victims is a local BBC reporter, 25-year-old Ahmed Omed Khpulwak. Five hours of fighting was triggered after insurgents detonated a car bomb outside the deputy provincial governor’s compound close to the main hospital in Trinkot, Uruzgan’s capital. Gunmen raided the Uruzgan radio and television station and from there attacked the base of Matiulllah Khan, a well-known militia commander whose fighters protect NATO convoys on the highway from Uruzgan to Kandahar city.
This was the deadliest attack to hit Afghanistan in more than a month.
The TTP has claimed responsibility for a botched attempt by Pakistani-born American Faisal Shahzad to explode a crude bomb packed into a sport utility vehicle in Times Square in May of last year. The bomb failed to go off and Shahzad was jailed for life in the United States. The sanction on TTP is a sequel to this plot.
In Pakistan, the TTP has claimed responsibility for a string of attacks including a 2009 strike on a police academy in Lahore that killed eight cadets and an assault on a Karachi naval base two months ago.
Continuing with the discussion on the efficacy of the UN sanctions, it is pertinent to note that early July the Security Council has removed 14 former Taliban leaders from the black list. None of these fourteen is a real Taliban and has a role to play in the peace making efforts in Af-Pak region; therefore whatever objectives the UNSC has set to achieve can be said to have been lost at the very outset. One of the fourteen is Maulvi Arsala Rahmani. A deputy minister in the erstwhile Taliban government, he is presently a member of Prof Burhanuddin Rabbani led 70-member peace jirga, which is not liked by the TTP at all.
According to noted Pakistani journalist, Rahimullah Yusufzai, who has been chronicling Taliban saga for the News International from his Peshawar Office, it is not the first such UNSC faux pas vis-à-vis Taliban. Earlier delist ‘benefited’ several former Taliban members who were dead, some who were no longer active or moved over to President Karzai’s camp.
Former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil and Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan during Taliban rule, were among those who were delisted last year. It didn’t help the peace process in Afghanistan as the Taliban refused to enter into negotiations with the Afghan government. These former Taliban no longer represent the TTP, and therefore neither the sanction nor the delisting will hurt the Taliban movement.
Probably, taking away names of leaders like, for instance, founder of Taliban movement Mullah Mohammad Omar and war lord Gulbaddin Hekmatyar from the UN blacklist may have had some impact on peace campaign. But that is not the case so far as the US is in no mood to ‘forgive’ them.
