Taliban Strongholds in Pakistan.
April 18, 2013
Analysis
In the latest violence in Pakistan's tribal belt along the Afghan border, up to 25 Pakistani soldiers and some 125 militants were killed in a new counterjihadist offensive. Pakistani ground and air forces since early April have sought to dislodge Taliban fighters from key heights in the Tirah Valley in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, one of the seven districts that make up the country's Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
This represents the biggest offensive in the region over the past two years against fighters from Pakistan's main Taliban rebel group, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, and their allies from Laskhar-e-Islam, a local Taliban faction. Islamabad launched a major counterjihadist offensive nearly four years ago to try to regain control of its northwest, a region that since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan increasingly has fallen under the control of Pakistani Taliban rebels aligned with al Qaeda.
The Pakistani armed forces have struggled to hold these areas long enough to build up civilian governance and pursue development projects to integrate its northwestern Pashtun periphery into the core. Civilian governance, however, has a long way to go before it can establish itself in the core of the country, and thus it is unlikely that peripheral areas affected by the Taliban insurgency will fall under Islamabad's writ anytime soon.
stratfor
