Islamabad: Pakistan's army on Tuesday decided to hold fire and respect an agreement signed between the government and militants to enforce Islamic law in the violence-hit Swat valley, a media report said.
"The army works on the government's orders. The government has given it orders to hold fire. The army will not take any offensive action," Geo TV quoted chief military spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as saying.
The army will "certainly" respect the agreement, he said.
"The army went there (Swat) at the request of the government. Whenever the government feels normalcy has been restored and the writ of government has been re-established, it will leave," he added.
"We have great deficiency - over 50 per cent in police and paramilitary forces, as well as in the civil administration. Unless and until these agencies back up the military operation, the situation will not improve to the satisfaction of the public," a military spokesperson said.
Islamabad agrees to Islamic law
Pakistan agreed on Monday to apply Shariat, a system of Islamic law, in Swat valley and other areas of the northwest to pacify a revolt, reports Reuters from Peshawar.
The decision is likely to draw criticism from the United States and other Western powers worried that appeasement will play into the hands of religious conservatives who sympathise with the Taliban and al Qaeda. But, the government fears that use of force to impose its will would only fuel an Islamist insurgency radiating out of tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and believes compromise was the best option to restore order in Swat.
"Those who adopted militancy, should move towards peace now the agreement has been reached," Chief Minister of North West Frontier Province, Amir Haider Khan Hoti, told a news conference after his government reached agreement with Islamists at a meeting in Peshawar.
"No new measures have been announced which were not in place before the entry by the Pakistan army into the Swat Valley," says Chief Editor of the Dawn newspaper, Hamid Haroon.
"We have to see whether the new measure of introducing the Shariya system of law in Mallakand will succeed anymore than it did three years ago. On the other hand one should understand what these measures are, how much impact this is going to have, whether President Zardari will sign the bill. I think they are trying to net out the Taliban issues and the local issues. This compromise has previously been a threat in President Musharraf's time who thought it workable and thought it was one way of dealing with the Swat Valley," Haroon added.
Taliban militants in Swat, once a tourist paradise, called a 10-day ceasefire the night before the talks, and in another gesture of goodwill on Saturday released a Chinese engineer kidnapped five months earlier.
The US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, said on a trip to India that events in Swat showed the United States, Pakistan and India faced a common enemy. "For the first time in 60 years since independence your country and Pakistan, the U.S., all face an enemy that poses a direct threat to our leadership, our capitals and our people," he said. "I talked to people from Swat and they were frankly quite terrified," Holbrooke told reporters in New Delhi, where he was meeting External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and top security officials after visiting Islamabad and Kabul last week.
The uprising erupted in late 2007 in Swat, an alpine beauty spot favoured by honeymooners and trekkers alike, and militants now control the valley just 130 km (80 miles) northwest of the capital Islamabad. They have destroyed more than 200 girls' schools in a campaign against female education, and tens of thousands of people have fled their homes to escape the violence.
(With inputs from IANS and Reuters)
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