Peshawar corps commander says focus is now on IDPs’ return, reconstruction

PESHAWAR: Corps Commander Peshawar Lt. General Hidayat ur Rehman said here on Monday that there was no need for any major military operation now as Zarb-e-Azb had achieved its physical goals and the focus had shifted to repatriating the displaced people and executing development and reconstruction projects in the affected areas.

Replying to questions at a briefing for the media at the 11 Corps Headquarters, he said 60 percent of the Temporarily Displaced Persons (TDPs) had already been repatriated to their native places in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), while the remaining 40 percent would be sent home by November 2016.

The corps commander Peshawar said fencing work in the Pakistani territory at Torkham was proceeding apace as part of the borderinitiative by Pakistan while similar plans were in the works for Nawa Pass, Gursal, Ghulam Khan, Angoor Adda, Kharlachi and Arandu on the Pak-Afghan border. He added that work on this project would start once funds were made available by the government.

He said from June 1 nobody would be allowed to enter Pakistan from Afghanistan at Torkham without valid passport and visa. He made it clear that easement rights weren’t mentioned in any past or new border agreement but Pakistan would continue to extend the facility to the tribes living near the border and allow them to travel 20kms into Pakistani territory for attending social events only. He pointed out that Pakistan hadn’t ceded any of its territory to Afghanistan at Angoor Adda as some people were mistakenly mentioning this but had handed over the border crossing point to the Afghan government. He said troops from the two countries entered each others’ areas on the border during the long years of conflict.

Lt. Gen Hidayat ur Rehman told a questioner that Pakistani forces had not entered the border town of Lwara Mandi in North Waziristan and Rajgal Valley in Tirah, Khyber Agency as no tactical benefit could be obtained by doing so. “We are able to observe movement of militants in Lwara Mandi and in the snow-covered Rajgal and they cannot stay there due to our airstrikes and artillery fire. We have posts at mountain peaks of Inzar Kas and Dwa Toi that dominate Lwara Mandi,” he said. He recalled that Pakistani troops deployed right on the border at the ‘zero line’ in Bajaur and Mohmand tribal agencies used to retaliate when fired at by Afghanistan-based militants and the Afghan government then complained about shells and rockets fired from Pakistan landing in their territory. “At Dattakhel in North Waziristan, 80-90 rockets were being fired at us from across the border so we decided to push forward to the Pak-Afghan border to tackle the threat so that the area could be made peaceful and stable for the displaced persons returning home,” he added.

When asked if the flow of funds from the federal government for rehabilitation and reconstruction activities in Fata was still slow, Hidayat ur Rehman said it had improved, particularly for meeting the needs of immediate rehabilitation of the TDPs. He said the government didn’t have the resources to make available Rs80 billion in one go or build the capacity to use all this money quickly. He said the army decided to stretch the project into four phases and the bank conditions impeding disbursement of compensation packages to the TDPs were overcome.

He was hopeful that the Pak-Afghan border would be better managed and controlled once the 79 new wings of the Frontier Corps are recruited, trained and deployed in the next three years.

In reply to a question, he said the waiting time at Torkham for people crossing the border would become less once the system was put in place and the seven lanes became fully functional. He added that the TDPs returning to their homes would be facilitated as life returned to normal and security restrictions were relaxed.

Earlier during the briefing, the members of the media were told that 90 threat alerts were received in the second quarter of 2016, mostly in Peshawar and Swat district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Bajaur and Mohmand agencies in Fata. It was disclosed that two major military actions were conducted in Bajaur north and south of Kitkot village in March and May to seal the Pak-Afghan border and gain vintage positions to dominate terrorists present across the border in Afghanistan. It was mentioned that Afghan villagers in Kunar were now disallowing militants from using their village to launch cross-border attacks in Pakistan as they didn’t want to suffer from retaliatory fire by the Pakistani forces.

The media was informed that 99.2 percent of the total area in Fata had been cleared of militants while the remaining 0.8 percent was contested. The journalists were told that 200,426 displaced families had returned to their homes and villages and the remaining 135,236 families would be repatriated by November this year. They were told that phase three of the immediate rehabilitation was now ongoing and Rs3.6 billion funds had been received out of the Rs5.3 billion needed for the purpose. However, only Rs5 billion had been received by the Fata Secretariat from the federal government out of the Rs30 billion needed for permanent reconstruction of the damaged infrastructure.

A positive piece of information shared with the media was that tribesmen were voluntarily returning weapons and in Land and Mohammad Khel villages near Boya in North Waziristan they had returned a number of weapons as they felt safe and were no longer in the business of selling arms.

It was also revealed that compared to Pakistan’s 535 posts on the Pak-Afghan border, Afghanistan had set up only 145 posts at an average of 7.8kms per post. The Pakistani border posts were sited on an average at a distance of two kilometres.