According to reports, the Pakistan Army lodged a formal protest on Friday to “allied forces” in Afghanistan over a suspected US missile strike this week that killed 14 people in Bajaur Agency.

According to The News editorial comment, the US has made clear its displeasure over ongoing attempts to reach deals with militants in FATA areas. A Pentagon official, using language harsher than that heard from Washington over the past few months, has also said Pakistan should make sure the deals are 'worth more than the paper they are written on.' Adopting the same tone, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Richard Boucher has said it would be unwise to make deals with militants that apparently give them an opportunity to regroup and re-strengthen while restricting the military. The US has also expressed obvious displeasure with the recent release of militants in exchange for about six soldiers, though a senior official of the NWFP government has already clarified that those released were not senior operatives and were more or less tribesmen.

US intervention in Pakistan's affairs, as this is a good example of, is almost always resented by most Pakistanis. To a very considerable extent such interference over the years has damaged Pakistan's interests, rather than having helped the country. Having said that, the fact of the matter is that it is in Pakistan's own interest to ensure that if any peace deal is to be considered with the militants, then the militants should be made to stick to their end of the bargain, and this should include the condition that no attacks should be launched in or outside Pakistan. Of course, this also means that a system for monitoring that this in fact happens needs to be put in place as well, and this may be a task in itself given the rugged and inhospitable nature of the long and winding Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

As Pakistan has learned to its cost, at least twice in the recent past, making deals with militants can be risky. On both of these occasions, the most recent in 2006, the militants did not lay down arms as they had promised and the regions under their control did in fact become sanctuaries for extremists and foreign terrorists. There is no guarantee this will not happen again.

The entire policy, in this regard, needs to be reviewed carefully. Whereas such ceasefires may offer temporary relief to the military, which has suffered losses in Waziristan over the past years, they offer no lasting solutions, especially since recent history has shown that they are indeed used by the militants to regroup and to gather their energies and resources to stage attacks across the border. This then angers NATO and ISAF, both of whom have troops in Afghanistan.

In this context, the strategy of cutting losses, which is perhaps what the deal entails for the Pakistan army, needs to be re-examined as well since such gains are only going to be short-lived, and there is no guarantee that at some point in time, the militants don't point their guns (and suicide bombers) back towards Pakistani territory. In the longer term, the only way that a peace deal can work is that (a) it should be strictly enforced and that (b) the region is placed on a priority footing in terms of socio-economic and infrastructure development.

It is this longer-term eradication of militancy that the state of Pakistan must strive for. Those engaged in violence must be stopped from carrying out their misdeeds -- anywhere -- for, failing this, there can be no hope of peace or an end to terrorism in the country.