Eight month after the Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif won the elections peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban, which he had promised, have finally begun:

The two sides gathered at the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa House in Islamabad for a preliminary meeting likely to chart a “roadmap” for future discussions, amid deep scepticism over whether dialogue can yield a lasting peace deal.

Sources said that talks were held in a cordial atmosphere and that negotiations would now be continued on a daily basis.

It is unclear though whether these talks will lead to an end of violent incidents which are attributed to the Taliban. A McClatchy report claims that prime minister Sharif no longer has hope for these talks to succeed and has planned an all out military assault on the Taliban borderlands with Afghanistan. There is reason to doubt that claim as the writer of that report also manipulates some facts:

[T]he Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, already has decided to press ahead with a massive military strike at the militants’ headquarters in North Waziristan, a tribal area bordering Afghanistan – and the insurgents know it’s coming.
…
After being sworn in, Sharif insisted that the option of peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban be explored, despite opposition from the country’s powerful military, which had all but routed the militants after five years of fighting involving 150,000 troops.

The TTP used the eight months since to regroup, organize and publicly demonstrate their renewed strength with the two-month wave of terrorist attacks. That response to Sharif’s reconciliatory policy has made him look ill-informed and naive, and much of the public anger generated by the terrorist attacks has targeted him.

Of course the Pakistani military never “all but routed the militants” which is what make peace talks a necessity in the first place.

The writer of that highlighted sentence is also leaving out some important historic events and is thereby coming to a very wrong conclusion.

There were few attacks from the Taliban during the first few months of Nawaz Sharif’s rule and preparations for peace talks went well along. But just a day before those were starting in earnest the Unites States killed the head of the TTP, Hakimullah Mahsud, in a targeted drone strike and thereby sabotaged those earlier peace talks.

It was only after Hakimullah’s assassination that the TTP launched a series of attacks against Pakistani security forces. For McClatchy to leave that out and to blame the attacks on Nawaz Sharif’s willingness for peace talks is a serious manipulation of the facts.

One central demand the TTP has is the end of the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan and the end of Pakistan’s support for it. The United States fears that Nawaz Sharif will agree to that and therefore has an interest to make any peaceful solution in Pakistan impossible.

Sharif’s alleged plan to use a wide ranging military campaign to fight the TTP will end like all such plans have ended since the British colonized India – in disaster. The Taliban will slip away and come back as soon as the attack is running out of steam. The plans for that attack are based on pipe dreams. As McClatchy claims:

[Sharif’s national security adviser] Aziz laid out a new policy under which Pakistan would act to secure the northwest tribal areas by the time the United States withdraws the last of its combat troops from Afghanistan in December. That entails a decisive operation in North Waziristan, with Pakistan seeking the support of the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force on the Afghan side of the border to cut off TTP escape routes.

How can ISAF forces block the border on the Afghan side when ISAF is withdrawing? It would take several brigades of ground troops to prevent Pakistani Taliban from slipping into Afghanistan. Such troops are no longer available and the planned campaign will therefore end just as pointless as earlier ones. The Taliban will cross the border and come back as soon as military exhausts it’s campaign drive.

Talks between the Taliban and the government are the only way to peace in Pakistan as well as in Afghanistan. One major point in such talks and a condition without which no success is possible is the end of foreign occupation and drone attacks. But as the U.S. wants to stay in Afghanistan it will do its best to sabotage such talks. Both those between the Afghan president Karzai and the Taliban in Afghanistan and those between the Pakistan premier Sharif and the Taliban in Pakistan.