Comment: Time to test Samiul Haq’s much-vaunted influence on the Taliban

PESHAWAR:

By bringing Maulana Samiul Haq into the ambit of the much-hyped peace talks the government seems to have recognised the markers that divide various militant outfits. But will the policy to take all ‘stakeholders’ on board pay off? Is a political settlement to the conflict in Pakistan a possibility at last? And most importantly, how far is the conflict along the Durand Line a local problem now?

Swarmed by journalists a day after his meeting with the Prime Minister – “My resolve to initiate a peace process is unhindered,” Maulana Samiul Haq, told The Express Tribune. However, he refused to comment on any other details for now. “They [journalists] just won’t let him be alone for a few minutes,” says his assistant.

The septuagenarian politician who heads a seminary in Akora Khattak and has his own faction of the Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam-S is traditionally considered to be the teacher of many of senior Taliban commanders in Afghanistan – including Mulla Omar. However, Haq’s influence upon the Pakistani Taliban is considered to be of less importance, at least till the recent past, when negotiations ended with the killing of Hakimullah Mehsud in a drone strike last year.

However, a newer leadership of the TTP has emerged since then. Fazlullah, who now heads the TTP is based along the strip of Afghanistan and believed to have links with a faction of the Afghan Taliban, while his deputy, Khalid Haqqani, who hails from Swabi district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, was once a student at Haq’s seminary, in fact the name Haqqani is an explicit reference to the Darul Uloom Haqqania itself.



But perhaps one of the strongest reasons to believe that Maulana Samiul Haq would have any role to play is the Difae Pakistan Council (DPC), a loosely knit conglomerate of more than 30 right-wing political parties and religious groups of which Haq is the chairman.

While there has been speculation about the role of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, previously considered to have been tasked to start the peace talks with the Taliban to have been left out, there seems to be little truth to believe this. Wednesday’s meeting between the JUI-F chief and Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan shows that the JUI-F is also on-board. And it now seems that there might be more people to join in.

While the JUI-F had previously proposed an “indigenous conflict resolution mechanism” – a policy document which provides a roadmap on how negotiations should be held, it also has the credit of holding an All Parties Conference in February last year  to which the ruling PML-N is a signatory.

While the military has previously endorsed any effort for peace negotiations backed by political forces, it still remains unclear what the parameters of the peace talks would be and how the army would react.

With all this said it still remains to be seen how the government or its confidantes will tackle the split militant factions. There has been no unanimous statement from the Taliban as yet.

However, there is a completely different aspect to the current developments – a political one. While Maulana Samiul Haq has previously agreed to work along with the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in K-P, the DPC’s endorsement of blocking the Nato supply line and the Maulana’s helping hand with the polio campaign of PTI chief Imran Khan, the PML-N might just have something more than peace talks on their agenda.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 2^nd, 2014.