ON the floor of her tent in a miserable refugee camp in Peshawar, Jahan Zeba lifts her veil to reveal a puckered bruise on her neck, the result of a Pakistani army bullet.
Eight months ago, the 32-year-old mother of eight was caught in crossfire between government troops and Taliban militants in her village in the remote Bajaur Agency, part of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan.
"There was a vet who used to look after my cows who stopped the bleeding. He arranged for me to get out but we were stopped by the army and they would not let me go until we paid them money," she says bitterly.
The Taliban terrorised Jahan's village, as they did so many in Bajaur Agency, in the months leading up to the military campaign launched last August to flush out the extremists. Girls were warned off attending schools, barbers' shops were destroyed, bridges and roads were bombed.
But far from delivering them from evil, the Pakistan army rained fresh hell on the people of Bajaur, razing entire villages in an intensive aerial bombing campaign that locals say killed far more civilians than militants.
"There was not a single Talib in our village," Jahan says. "All those the army captured were just ordinary people; most of them were government employees.
"There were more than 400 houses in my village; six are left. We are left with nothing."
Across the Kacha Garhi refugee camp - a swamp of human misery and rising resentment - similar stories are told.
The Government has since claimed to have won the battle against militants in Bajaur. But in the minds of an estimated one million Pakistanis in billeted slums and refugee camps across the country's collapsing North-West Frontier Province, there is little that separates the villainous acts of the Taliban from those of government forces.
Both are responsible for the mass internal displacement that is now straining government and humanitarian agency resources and threatening to entrench militancy among a vast population of destitute and disaffected Pakistanis.
At Kacha Garhi's UNICEF-run tent school, 10-year-old Rabia Naimat Ullah says her school received numerous warnings from the Taliban to shut down.
"Some of the big girls were picked up by the Taliban for going to school and later were slaughtered," she says through an interpreter.
In the days before her family home was destroyed by military bombing last August, she says her family spent hours huddled together in a trench dug by her father.
Despite the trauma, Rabia says she wants to return to Bajaur.
"I miss my house and the trees and the fields," she says. "All I do in the camp is come to the school, and that's it."
When asked who she blames she says: "We're angry with both of them. One of them stopped us from going to school and the others have destroyed our houses.
"Our parents say, 'Why have they involved the common people in something that was not our fault?"'
Many believe the Bajaur offensive, which began just days after Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani visited Washington, DC last July, was launched at the behest of the US administration. The Government is also suspected of aiding US drone attacks on militant hideouts in South Waziristan, despite its public objections that the strikes are turning civilians against the US.
This week, all eyes were on Washington as US and Pakistani leaders met once again to discuss the country's security crisis. Amid the mutual assurances of support and commitment to fighting the militant scourge, there was little sign in the public statements yesterday that a clear military strategy for defeating the Taliban had emerged.
US President Barack Obama said he was pleased that Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari "fully appreciate the seriousness of the threat that we face, and have reaffirmed their commitment to confronting it".
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the talks had shown "very promising early signs" and she was impressed by how Pakistan was taking the fight to the Taliban, after she had last month castigated the Government for abdicating to the militants.
Zardari said: "We stand with our brother Karzai and the people of Afghanistan against this common threat, this menace, which I have called a cancer."
But no evident progress was made on the desperate need for emergency funds to deal with the humanitarian crisis developing in Pakistan's northwest.
Analysts, humanitarian agencies and even Pakistani officials have warned that failure to address the human suffering will lead to disaster. More than half of Bajaur Agency's estimated 600,000 people are believed to have been displaced since August.
Of the 16,000 people in Kacha Garhi camp, at least 80 per cent are from Bajaur. Fifty minutes down the road, Bajauris represent a similar proportion of the 50,000 refugees in the Jalozai camp.
And many, many more are coming.
As many as 500,000 people are said to have been displaced from neighbouring Swat Valley during the Taliban's bloody 18-month campaign for control of the district. Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis have been forced from their homes as the Taliban have marched from the FATA to Swat and, in recent weeks, Mardan, Lower Dir and Buner, the last of which is just 100km from Islamabad.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees set up three new camps this week in the NWFP towns of Mardan and Swabi, both of which share a border with the new Taliban front in Buner. The Government is also setting up an additional three camps.
In eight months the UNHCR has registered almost 560,000 internally displaced people. About 94,000 of those - the most desperate, who have no resources or families to lean on - are living in refugee camps across NWFP.
Islamabad-based UNHCR spokeswoman Massoumeh Farman-Farmaian says the number of Pakistani refugees migrating from the ever-shifting nucleus of militant violence and army reprisals is probably much higher. Most analysts estimate the number to be at least one million. On Monday and Tuesday alone, the UNHCR registered another 3500 displaced families, representing about 22,000 people. The official total of displaced people from Lower Dir and Buner is about 50,000, but it is expected to rise sharply.
Renewed fighting in Swat Valley this week is adding to the humanitarian toll. Local officials have estimated as many as 500,000 people will flee in coming days as the two sides engage in intense fighting in the region's main cities and settled areas. At least 36 civilians were reportedly killed in fighting on Wednesday in Swat; most of them were caught in the crossfire or targeted by the army for breaking the government-imposed curfew.
The Swat peace deal struck in February - in which the federal Government agreed to impose sharia law in Swat and the Malakand region in exchange for the militants' laying down their arms - is in tatters. Rather than disarming, Swat-based Taliban appeared to view the accord as an invitation to extend their reach from the mountains of NWFP, where they have proven their mettle in counter-insurgency battles against government troops, to the plains.
Security forces responded more than a week ago with a new offensive to expel the militants, sending in helicopter gunships and ground troops to fight hundreds of armed Taliban. Thousands of civilians have since been forced from the region.
"It's a desperate situation and with this new outflow of people it's only going to get worse," Farman-Farmaian tells The Australian. International donations for the displaced have been slow to trickle in. An urgent plea to donors last September fell largely on deaf ears.
A new plea in January brought little more enthusiasm.
All agencies working with the internally displaced people face serious budget shortfalls. UNICEF, which finances and runs schools and health centres across the camps, estimates its shortfall is $11 million for this year; the figure that is bound to rise with the new wave of internal refugees.
Farman-Farmaian says it is the same across all agencies, and donors are just beginning to realise the gravity of the situation. Donors include Australia, which has pledged funds for education and sanitation facilities in the Jalozai camp.
"The trouble is that from the time we receive the funding to when we can deliver on the ground can take months. It could be three months before that poor person who has come in today receives that," she says.
"We're trying to get people to see the merit in helping FATA people living outside of there; to give them the assistance they need and deserve and to act as a buffer, because tomorrow if they don't get a chance and some other group - maybe militants, or Taliban - offers them funds, then they are going to takethem."
Kacha Garhi's camp administrator Arbab Arshad, a physically imposing man with a gentle disposition, says the people in the camp are angry all the time and take their frustrations out on management.
So far he is managing the delicate security situation by negotiating with tribal elders, but the climate inside the camp remains very tense. "Naturally they're angry. Anybody should be if they're displaced. Living in this camp is very difficult," he says.
The Government fears Taliban are hiding among the vast numbers of displaced people now spread across the NWFP and other Pakistani cities, and want to ensure the people return to their villages.
Arshad says he has yet to see any sign of Taliban in Kacha Garhi but has no doubt the camp harbours many relatives of the extremists. He believes forced repatriations are imminent but wonders how people can be sent back when the road back to Bajaur, the same one that leads to Lower Dir, is now filled with displaced people streaming out in the opposite direction.
Humanitarian agencies such as the UNHCR are anxiously awaiting the outcome of the Washington talks and the passage of a US bill that proposes spending $US7.5 billion ($9.95billion) over five years to rebuild devastated communities and create opportunities in some of Pakistan's poorest regions.
Since taking office in January, the Obama administration has placed Pakistan at the centre of its fight against Islamic militancy and talked of the need for social as well as military investment.
But Obama has also warned that any further US military aid will be conditioned on Pakistan's success in routing jihadis from the FATA tribal areas and sealing the porous border with Afghanistan.
Pakistani analyst and Taliban expert Ahmed Rashid says the latest military action is indicative of the army's usual stop-go approach to fighting the Taliban.
"Both the US and Pakistan are handling militancy the wrong way," he says.
"We're not conducting a proper counter-insurgency strategy. There's been no sustained campaign. The civilian development component has been completely missing even as we tackle militancy in Swat and Buner.
"We have more than one million refugees in NWFP. What's needed on the Pakistan side is money: development aid, budgetary support, international humanitarian aid."
Farman-Farmaian says there has never been a more urgent need to win the hearts and minds of Pakistanis.
"They're angry with the Government, the militants, everyone. Their lives have been disrupted, they've had to leave everything behind. They have no hope or future.
"We need to show these people that somebody cares and that help is on its way. That their children will go to school and they will have a future. If we don't, there's no telling what could happen.
"We can't wait another nine months."
Caught in the crossfire | The Australian
