Muslim clerics ordering Taliban into Afghanistan

On September 5 an "accord" took place between the Pakistani government and the Taliban who control most of the borderlands of North and South Waziristan in North-West Frontier Province. The deal signed by Taliban leaders and Pakistan government representatives included the clause: "There shall be no cross-border movement for militant activity in neighbouring Afghanistan."

In exchange for signing the deal, 45 Taliban members who had helped to broker the deal were paid 100,000 rupees apiece ($1,658), and the government promised the Taliban 10 million rupees ($165,838) if it did not return to them vehicles and weaponry it had seized during military operations.

Within days of the deal being signed, it was being broken. The three-page agreement included the clause "There will be no target killing", but bodies of people executed by the Taliban as "US spies" began to turn up.

Pakistan wanted to reduce its troop deployment from the border region. Apparently 80,000 troops have been stationed on the border, and these were needed in Balochistan province, where a new insurgency was forming.

The politicians who had come up with the idea were the Islamists in the Regional Assembly of North-West Frontier Province. The provincial government is made up almost entirely of members of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal or MMA. This is an alliance of six Islamist parties, who constitute the opposition to the government.

The leader of the MMA is the cleric Qazi Hussain Ahmed, who is also leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, which wishes to see Pakistan entirely ruled by sharia law. He promised last year to mount a revolution, and organised many of the anti-cartoon riots in February, which became violent calls for the overthrow of the government.

It should have been obvious to anyone with any intelligence that a deal supported by the MMA and the Taliban would work only in the interests of Muslim extremism, and would not benefit either the government of Afghanistan, Pakistan nor its allies in the "war on terror". Analysts expressed their concerns when the "accord" was made and today, their fears appear to have been validated.

Agence France Presse in Yahoo News reports that captured Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan have confessed to coming from Pakistan, and they claim that they were sent to fight "Jihad" against British forces there on the orders of Muslim clerics.

Three young Taliban fighters were captured after their group's attempt to ambush a platoon of Afghanistan soldiers in Barmal district of Paktika province went awry. 32 Taliban attacked a patrol but were met with fierce gunfire. The Afghanistan troops called in reinforcements, and within five hours, all of the Taliban fighters, save three, were dead or had fled. The fire-fight took place close to the Afghan/Pakistani border.

The 24 dead were mostly Afghan Taliban, but also included an Arab, Chechens, Pakistanis, Turks, and a man from Yemen. The three survivors included an Afghan and two Pakistanis. Some of those not killed by Afghan forces blew themselves up with grenades rather than be captured.

One of the Pakistanis, a youth called Alahuddin, said: "Mullahs in Pakistan were preaching to us that we are obliged to fight jihad in Afghanistan because there are foreign troops -- there is an Angriz (British) invasion. A Pakistani Taliban commander, Saifullah, introduced us to a guide who escorted us to Barmal. Then he left and we joined a group already here and came to the ambush site."

He had only been in Afghanistan for two days before he became captured. he said: "We were sent to Afghanistan blindly. We call on our other friends i