PESHAWAR: The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan negotiators may or may not be able to strike a peace deal, but they have brought clarity to the negotiations table: they are the political face of the militant outfit.

The TTP team`s success to deliver peace in collaboration with the official interlocutors will be a welcome development for the country as opposed to its failure that will be without a cogent justification since three of the four men on the other side of the table areperceived as the TTP negotiators brother-in-arms, according to political scientists and senior academicians.

`This process has done one good thing to remove the confusion, if there was any, as it has introduced TTP`s political faces to the society at large,` said Dr Ijaz Khan Khattak, a senior professor of international relations at the University of Peshawar.

His viewpoint is in conformity with the opinion a couple of other senior UoP academicians expressed when Dawn spoke to them separately.

`They (TTP`s negotiators) make up their political wing. There is no doubt left anymore,` said Dr Sarfaraz Khan, the Director of the Area Study Centre, UoP.

He said every organisation tended to have representatives in parliament, some influence public opinion, and others were solely meant to use weapons.

`There is nothing new to it. The sameold episode is being repeated,` said Dr Khan.

Dr AZ Hilali, who is the Chairman of UoP`s Political Science Department, held that the TTP selection had exposed many, doing good to the nation.

`Though the TTP choice of negotiators would result in complications, the men selected for the job have benefited the nation as the society now clearly knows who is standing with the Taliban and those siding with the thousands of men, women, and children who lost lives to the militant activities,` said Dr Hilali.

He, however, said Pakistan Tehreek-iInsaf chief Imran Khan and Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman`s refusal to be part of the TTP negotiating team would deprive it the popular support the militant outfit tried to gain by giving the two parties representation in its negotiating team.The TTP move to include PTI and JUI-F representatives in its team, said Dr Hilali, would still harm the two parties.

`A good number of people know that their support to the Taliban in public is more the result of their antiAmericanism than their love for the militants, but now that distinction has swept away been after the TTP asked them to represent it,` said the political scientist.

Like him, Dr Khattak too wants the peace talks to succeed but insists both of them lack optimism.

Maulana Samiul Haq (TTP interlocutor), said Dr Khattak, had claimed that he could bring Taliban to the negotiations table, but the issue, he added, was not the TTP or its negotiators. `It`s the process itself,` he said, doubting the credibility of the approach adopted for resolving the crisis.

For Dr Hilali, the shadow of failurelooms large on the negotiations in the absence of `real stakeholders` on the two sides.

`Both, the official negotiators and the TTP team do not have representatives from those who manage the operational details: the TTP militant commanders and the Pakistan army, he said.

Dr Hilali said the negotiating teams were weak and they could not make a breakthrough without having representatives from those involved in conducting on the ground operations against each other.

`They need to sit together to decide technical details and military aspects of the issue,` said the academicians.

Without bringing members of their operational sides to the negotiations table, said Dr Hilali, the two sides could not go back to the operational commanders off and on once, and if, the talks commenced at all.However, Dr Khan said the peace talks formed a lost cause for the general public.

`This (peace process) makes part of their (the TTP and political parties with right wing leanings) long-term plan: establish Caliphate in the country and revive its old status,` said Dr Khan.

Conveying a sense of hopelessness about the two negotiating teams` success to strike a peace deal, Dr Khattak said they did not have any reason to fail.

`Since there is no difference of opinion among the two sides, their members share the same ideology and therefore, they will not a justification if they fail to deliver peace to the country, said Dr Khattak.

`In a way, this is a good thing to have happened: the TTP will not complain or accuse anybody since both the sides represent them in the peace talks,` he said.