 First, very briefly, just to pick up on the earlier discussion in the morning, just to reiterate some of the differences between the Afghan and the Pakistan Taliban situation. I think this is quite important to understand. First of all, in Pakistan, the Taliban are using religion as a political tool. They're using it as they have traditionally done, even in the past century or more, whenever they've fought whichever the central power is that they're fighting, that they use religion as a kind of political glue to bring tribes together and to battle them. Secondly, there is, of course, socioeconomic grievances and there are charges of absence of justice and particularly in Swat, which is not in the tribal belt. There was a big gap after the princely state of Swat was enveloped into the government of Pakistan. In the princely state, there was actually a very rudimentary form of justice, but it was very rapid justice. So every month they used to be an opportunity for ordinary citizens to gather and present their grievances to the Wali of Swat, the ruler of Swat, and he would immediately reach a decision and pronounce judgment. So people knew that they had recourse to justice. When it was enveloped into the state of Pakistan, there was no provision made for giving people the same level of care and control and justice. And so over time this situation deteriorated, allowing people who wanted to take advantage of this chaos and confusion to start asserting their power grab and using religion as a tool. Another big difference is that unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan has a very well disciplined and organized and a very large military. And it has, unfortunately, and this is a huge difference, it is fighting its own people. In Afghanistan, this is a big difference. The Taliban are using the fact that there are foreign troops to galvanize support for them to even coerce people into helping them in the battle against the U.S. and NATO forces. In Pakistan, this is not the case and in fact this becomes a serious issue for the Pakistan military itself because when you are fighting your own people, there are huge repercussions on issues like collateral damage, whether it's damage of property or people. And just to give you another big difference between the battle in Afghanistan and the battle in Pakistan, Pakistan for the first time since independence when it had removed all its troops from the area that's now known as the federally-administered tribal area by agreement with the tribes and on the orders of the first, the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, they removed all the British garrisons and all the troops that Pakistan had inherited. They emptied the cantonments of Wana and Rasmukh and all the other traditional sites. And so for the first time under General Musharraf, the Pakistan army was entering Fata and it was seen as an alien force. It was seen as a surrogate of the U.S. And it saw itself as an alien force too largely because of the composition of the army. It is still predominantly based on the population, 60 percent Punjabi dominated military with about 14.6 percent Bakhtuns. So by the very nature of the composition of the military it was seen as an alien force and it saw itself as an alien force. No attempt was made at the time that the force was injected to try and identify those regiments that had 50 percent Bakhtun composition to send them in because they're the officers and the junior commission officers and would have been able to speak Pashto and would have been able to converse to the locals. So these are some of the differences. There are similarities too going back to Michael's and the other comments that were made earlier. When we talk of the Taliban in Pakistan it's a conjury of very disparate groups. You have the TTP which originated in Waziristan but it's now basically a brand name that has provided an umbrella for bringing all the other disaffected groups and some of them are just plain crooks who are taking advantage of the situation to cover their criminal activities. And you also include much older groups like the TNSM which Intiaz referred to and which Rodney also referred to in the settled area of Swat which has actually been in existence since 1989. So it predates the arrival of the word Taliban in Pakistan's polity. There are also regional satraps, I mean there are tribal groups as well as individuals within tribes who want to assert their power and control over resources and so they have aligned themselves in this kind of trans-tribal conglomerate. And then behind it all is Al Qaeda which as was said in the morning session is using this as a very useful leverage in order to exercise its kind of franchise arrangement and it has also attracted the Punjabi militant groups, the Sunni Punjabi militant groups from Central and Southern Punjab that had formally been trained by the ISI as part of the Kashmir Jihad which have now aligned themselves in the fighting inside Fatha on a sectarian basis in the Quraam agency for instance but have also increasingly become a franchisee of Al Qaeda and the TTP in the rest of Pakistan and have been involved in a number of the attacks inside Pakistan and copper including against the military. So these are sort of some of the factors that one needs to recognize and there isn't a silver bullet that will allow us to deal with this whole agglomeration. Now as Imtiaz has pointed out when you talk of negotiations it's really groundhog day. It is a constant repetition of the same old, same old and when I say same old, same old I don't just mean in the last few years just yesterday I was looking at a Waziristan report from 1894 and I tell you it is exactly the same story. A tribal group would launch an attack or snipe at Razmak or Bana or one of these places or kidnap someone, a Hindu boy in one case or an officer or a soldier and then there'd be a punitive expedition and the tribes would be beat up by a large force mainly natives commanded by British 2000 but against the Masoods the largest ever force was 10,400 in those days which was a lot of manpower and then once they were beat up basically they would come crawling back in Sioux for peace and a peace deal would be signed and then they would be compensated, they'd be given money and not only that but those that were more conciliatory than the rest would be made mullocks and would be put on the official dome and that practice has continued since the late 19th century till this day. It has involved the kind of corruption of the tribal system and of the Jirga so you now have official Jirga and this is at the root of the governance issue in this part of the world so you basically, it's very interesting that even the British report uses the word Hayatoba which is the Paktun tribes would come and basically beg for forgiveness and then they'd be rewarded so there was a kind of a built-in incentive structure which allowed the rebellion or the insurgencies to faster and to continue. Let me put a little more historical background on the rise of talibanization and I think here I need to pull back to a much wider canvas as Rodney promised you as I would. First of all, Fata is a forgotten part of Pakistan, 62 years after the country became independent it has the worst socioeconomic indicators of any part of Pakistan so can you blame anyone if they feel that they were forgotten in fact in the local language nobody refers to it as Fata which is an English acronym it is still called Ilaka Reir which is the foreign land you know it's as if it doesn't exist it's not a part of Pakistan so politically economically socially and even physically it has it is still behind the so-called prickly hedge that the British talked about so there is really no belonging sense of belonging and no sense of participation in the polity and economics of Pakistan. Secondly over time the state of Pakistan has become a very changed state from the Pakistan which was conceived by the founder Mr. Jinnah as a state where Muslims could lead their own lives as Muslims and everybody else of every other faith could lead his or her life according to that faith to a state which became first the Republic of Pakistan and then interestingly under so-called secular leadership the Islamic Republic of Pakistan so there was a gradual descent into a kind of introduction of ritualistic Islam that took over Pakistan polity and society and this is the blowback from from that movement in my humble view. Over time Islam became a tool of government it was used for cynical purposes by all the political leaders whether they were military or civil starting with Zeyaul Haqq and even before him by President and then Prime Minister Bhutto who used Islam in order to win some tactical advantages but they didn't end up saving his government in 1977 I don't know if many of you recall but it was he who banned the Ahmadis as a Muslim group and created a sectarian divide there it was he who made Pakistan officially a dry country it was he who made Friday the day of holiday in Pakistan in fact stealing the thunder of poor Zeyaul Haqq who would have wanted to have made all these moves and and carried favor with the population in general so over time there's been a kind of a blowback as a result of this official sponsorship of ritualistic Islam and a very convoluted interpretation by many individuals and groups along the periphery of what they call Sharia in fact there is no consensus on what is proper Sharia there was no consensus in the 50s when the Munir Commission in Pakistan looked at the idea of sectarian violence and came to the conclusion on the basis of testimony by all the leading Ulima the religious scholars who were all asked one question can you define a Muslim and none of them could come to the same definition so there's obviously a desire to create some kind of homogenous view of Islam in Pakistan but it has failed because it's a very pluralistic society regardless and so the whole idea of creating this homogenous view of Islam was also supported by the fact that the center wanted to control everything although Pakistan was a federation the periphery was always disregarded and Fata is the extreme periphery so Balochistan had its grievances and that's why they were insurgencies as Balochistan East Pakistan had its grievances because that was the periphery and we saw what happened there it became an independent entity and now of course parts of NWSP and Fata are the scene of an insurgency because they feel that their governance their economic interests are not being regarded by the center so somehow the lack of pluralism as well as this kind of fall into the lap of ritualistic Islam is fostering the Talibanization of Pakistani society and so there's a lack of economic opportunity now what can we do first of all we have to differentiate between the Afghan Taliban who as was pointed out earlier use Pakistan as a sanctuary but they've been very smart they use their tribal ties and local support in order to come and go and they have not raised any military action against the state of Pakistan and as a result the state of Pakistan has been hedging its bets on what will be the outcome in Afghanistan and they have therefore not lost any operations against the Afghan Taliban so you have to separate them it's the local Taliban the TNSM and the Punjabi militants that the government needs to deal with and the question here is are you going to cede space to them which is what happened in each of the deals that Imtiaz talked about because you you agreed to withdraw the military to camps and when you withdrew you created a vacuum and they filled the vacuum you didn't have the administration you didn't have the civil judicial system in place to give people the kind of support that they needed for their daily lives and economic activities and the Taliban stepped in and they started resolving disputes and executing justice rapidly and I use the word executing as a pun because they did they would bring in two people and say what are your problems and appoint Akhazi on the spot and Akhazi would pronounce the judgment and one person would get shot and the other would win the argument so they provided justice very rapidly this was the kind of brutal horrific system and the agreement that they signed I just one point of contention on Imtiaz I actually saw the April 2008 agreement and it's a very simple agreement it says you know they will not burn girls schools so they were very straightforward conditions that was signed by the ANP leadership and the the TNSM leadership and the very next day they burnt the schools but the ANP government was so scared that they didn't want to challenge them on it and they kept the military in the camps till the situation got so much out of control that the military had to be called out again the same thing happened in the most recent deal which after a period where the military was withdrawn while the government was discussing the issue of the Nizami Adil the system of justice that they would bring to Swat that the Taliban swarmed the area and took over so the military had to eventually come in because of this one video of this poor girl being beaten that created so much support for military action in the rest of Pakistan but then the military action did not anticipate the IDPs and there was 2.5 3 million whatever you call it a huge number of internally displaced people and that issue still remains and it's going to bedevil the situation the conclusion I come to is this that military operations are only a way of addressing the symptoms they do not address the root causes you have to address the socioeconomic needs of the people and in Fatha in particular you need to be able to create jobs and it's by my calculation it's only 300,000 jobs that need to be created this is the 17% of the male youth that are part of the youth bulge of the population of Fatha total population 3.5 million half women they only have a 3% literacy rate so you cannot employ them immediately so you have to create jobs for the young men and if you create these 300,000 jobs you basically soaking up the entire catchment pool of recruits for the Taliban if you do that you can help start changing the thing the United States has been pushing the ROZ's and we know the Pakistani government has been pushing ROZ's these will be a heavily subsidized way of creating jobs they're not ideally located economically because the Chinese experience has shown us that they need to be their large urban areas they need to be there heavy infrastructure and communication and all that is missing in Fatha so my suggestion would be if you want to reconcile if you want to bring people over to your side you need to create opportunities for work for them you need to get infrastructure construction projects build roads connecting Fatha to the rest of Pakistan build small dams build embankments to control the rivers set up tube wells provide a livelihood and a possibility of a livelihood to the people and they will solve their own problems but then at least they will feel connected they'll feel that something is being done for them what should be the US role that is a question that Rodney has posed to us I think the US role is really ideal only in creating an enabling environment for the government of Pakistan and the people of Pakistan to do all these things to create a political situation that is mature that develops civilian supremacy over time so that the threat of military intervention is reduced but the US should not intrude too overtly nor be seen as siding with any single individual or party or a group or institution the moment you do that then it's groundhog day all over again for the US Pakistan relationship and that's a totally different story and I spent a lifetime covering that they're trying to capture it in my books I'm not going to bother with you that let me stop here thank you very much