Pakistan peace talks with Taliban militants will probably fail and an ensuing military operation would lead to more terrorism, according to Imran Khan, head of the party that runs a province bordering Afghanistan.

Negotiators representing Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government and Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan -- known as the Pakistani Taliban, or TTP -- called for a cease-fire yesterday after starting formal talks for the first time to end violence the government says has killed 40,000 Pakistanis since 2001. The TTP had named Khan as a negotiator, a post he turned down.

“The most likely result is that the negotiations will start, there will be about three or four big explosions and terrorist attacks and the negotiations will be called off,” Khan, a former cricket star and a vocal advocate of peace talks, said in an interview yesterday at his villa in the hills of Islamabad. “There will be people baying for blood and the operation will start.”

Khan’s pessimism signals further instability in Pakistan, which would threaten Sharif’s efforts to revive the $225 billion economy as the U.S. prepares to draw down troops in neighboring Afghanistan. Khan blocked NATO supply routes to Kabul in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa region where his party holds power to protest American drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and called for the U.S. to publicly announce an end to the aerial attacks.

Drone Attacks

“If the U.S. stops drone attacks, announces stopping the drone attacks during the talks, it would be a big plus point,” said Khan, whose Tehreek-e-Insaf party is the third-largest in parliament. “Then the talks would become really meaningful.”

Government negotiators said talks will only focus on militancy-hit areas as Taliban representatives demanded meetings with Sharif and the army chief to discuss the peace process, according to a joint statement issued by both committees yesterday.

Sharif won an election last year after pledging negotiations with the TTP, a loose group of militants operating along the Afghan border. Shortly after Sharif received the backing of all political parties in September to begin negotiations, Taliban fighters assassinated a major-general in the Pakistani army and killed 81 Christians in a suicide bomb attack at a Peshawar church.

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