FaujHistorian
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Operation Zarb-e-Azb | Updates, News & Discussions.
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Mugwop
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I don't know that but I do know that TTP BLA and all these guys don't like each other. They can be very territorial when it comes to land.
KingMamba
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They are few in number and can be defeated simply by uplifting Baluchistan province.
fatman17
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June 19, 2014
Pakistan’s Offensive, America’s Withdrawal
Posted by Steve Coll
For five years or more, the United States has been urging Pakistan to clear North Waziristan, a semi-autonomous tribal agency along the Afghan border, of foreign fighters and Taliban. North Waziristan has been a deep haven for Arab, Central Asian, Punjabi, Taliban, and sectarian militants, and the headquarters of the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban faction that has repeatedly bombed and gunned down civilians in Kabul.
Insurgents trying to overthrow the Pakistani state have also launched one bloody attack after another from North Waziristan. Most recently, a few weeks ago, a team of Uzbek fighters shocked the country by killing more than two dozen people during a suicide-by-police-style-raid on Karachi’s international airport.
This week, the Pakistani military finally moved. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced the launch of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, named in reference to a sword of the Prophet Muhammad. The Army, in its own announcement, called it a “comprehensive operation against foreign and local terrorists” who “had been disrupting our national life in all its dimensions.” It vowed to “eliminate these terrorists, regardless of their hue and color.”
In the opening days of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, Pakistani F-16s have bombed forested mountains where some of the groups have camps. The Army claimed to have killed about two hundred opposition fighters. The C.I.A. has apparently launched several drone strikes near Miran Shah and in other areas of the agency this week, reviving its secret air war over North Waziristan after a long period of quietude. These strikes were almost certainly commissioned and supported by Pakistan’s military and intelligence services; it would seem unthinkable for the Obama Administration to act unilaterally with drones just when Pakistan was at last doing what it had long urged.
Why now? The Karachi airport attack was a precipitating event, but there have been many such outrages. The deeper answer involves America’s impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to the military officers, advisers, and civilian analysts I’ve spoken to here.
I happened to be in Pakistan when Zarb-e-Azb began. The country’s proliferating cable news channels (absent the largest, Geo, which has been suspended temporarily for earlier broadcasting reports that the military found offensive) instantly rolled out colorful BREAKING NEWS and nation-at-war graphics that make Fox News look restrained. Animated tanks, fighter jets, and armed trucks zipped across the bottom of the TV screen at random moments during talk shows. As field reporters delivered standups in split-screen boxes, animated F-16s flew bombing runs, over and over, as if to induce hypnosis. The cartoon planes bombed into smithereens an artist’s rendering of a mud-walled desert compound.
In Islamabad, the 111th Infantry Brigade, known as the “coup brigade” because its proximity to the capital has led it to execute the Army’s periodic takeovers of government, has deployed with the paramilitary Rangers to strengthen the city’s defenses in the capital against an expected backlash of terrorist attacks. Islamabad was already a city that had gotten used to barbed wire, barricades, and checkpoints; now there are more of those, and more roving armed patrols as well.
The Army has cordoned off North Waziristan and imposed curfews while it attempts to evacuate tens of thousands of civilians to camps outside the tribal agency. If similar military campaigns carried out in recent years in South Waziristan, Swat, and Bajaur are any guide, North Waziristan’s residents, already among Pakistan’s very poorest, are in for a prolonged period of suffering as internal refugees.
North Waziristan lies across the border from the Afghan provinces of Khost and Paktia. For several years, Pakistan’s Army has been forecasting quietly that the American effort to quickly build the Afghan National Army from scratch into a fighting force of at least two hundred and fifty thousand would fail. Eventually, Pakistan’s military high command fears, the United States and its allies will grow tired of paying the Afghan Army’s huge salary and equipment bills (perhaps four billion dollars a year), and then the country’s Army and police will unravel into factional militias, much as Iraq’s American-trained Army has melted away under pressure during the past few weeks. Pakistan’s greatest concrete security concern is how such an Afghan unravelling might spill into its territory.
Afghanistan is in the midst of an uncertain election transition this year. The votes haven’t been counted in last weekend’s runoff round, but one of the two candidates, Abdullah Abdullah, has already alleged that there was fraud on a grand scale. The great majority of American troops will be gone by the end of 2014. Pakistan’s Army wanted to move in North Waziristan now so that it can push forward military defensive lines along its western border against the possible Afghan chaos to come.
Among other things, Pakistan’s generals fear what is sometimes referred to as the “reverse sanctuary” problem—that is, rather than Pakistan providing sanctuary for anti-Afghan fighters, as it has done for several decades, Afghanistan might become a durable sanctuary for anti-Pakistan groups. Indeed, the current chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Mullah Fazlullah, is said to be hiding out in northeastern Afghanistan, along with other armed radicals.
What of the Haqqani network, a tacit ally of Pakistan and a scourge of American generals in Afghanistan? The Haqqanis previously were the main instrument of Pakistan’s forward strategy in North Waziristan. They provided a loyal but imperfect front line—loyal because the Haqqanis studiously avoided attacking the Pakistani state, but imperfect because they harbored other groups that did hit Pakistan.
There is no reason to assume that Pakistan has turned on the Haqqanis. But the Army may prefer to push the network’s fighters, at least for a while, into eastern Afghanistan, where they also control territory. (They are, after all, Afghans.) The Haqqanis’ evacuation from their strongholds around Miran Shah would create space for Pakistan to attack the North Waziristan-rooted groups that it loathes most of all—the Uzbeks, Chechens, Uighurs (who spook Pakistan’s critical ally, China), and certain virulent and irreconcilable Pakistani Taliban. According to Pakistani intelligence estimates, there may be about two thousand Uzbek fighters and hundreds of Punjabi Taliban in North Waziristan today—those groups alone promise tough going.
Pakistan gained independence in 1947. It left Waziristan alone until 2002, when the Pakistani Army entered in force for the first time, also at American urging. That incursion began falteringly, but more recently the Army has gained confidence and some measure of stability in South Waziristan, if hardly a victory. The Army would like to pull back and put civilian administrators and perhaps political parties in the lead. But Pakistan’s civil government is too weak, and Waziristan’s insurgent, criminal, and terrorist networks are too deep to expect normalcy anytime soon. Even in the best of circumstances, Pakistan’s military occupation of all of Waziristan now looks to be a multi-decade project, akin to the Indian occupation of Kashmir or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank—a heavy load on a state that already has too many.
Photograph by Shakil Adil/AP.
dont like the last paragraph......
Pakistan’s Offensive, America’s Withdrawal
Posted by Steve Coll
For five years or more, the United States has been urging Pakistan to clear North Waziristan, a semi-autonomous tribal agency along the Afghan border, of foreign fighters and Taliban. North Waziristan has been a deep haven for Arab, Central Asian, Punjabi, Taliban, and sectarian militants, and the headquarters of the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban faction that has repeatedly bombed and gunned down civilians in Kabul.
Insurgents trying to overthrow the Pakistani state have also launched one bloody attack after another from North Waziristan. Most recently, a few weeks ago, a team of Uzbek fighters shocked the country by killing more than two dozen people during a suicide-by-police-style-raid on Karachi’s international airport.
This week, the Pakistani military finally moved. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif announced the launch of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, named in reference to a sword of the Prophet Muhammad. The Army, in its own announcement, called it a “comprehensive operation against foreign and local terrorists” who “had been disrupting our national life in all its dimensions.” It vowed to “eliminate these terrorists, regardless of their hue and color.”
In the opening days of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, Pakistani F-16s have bombed forested mountains where some of the groups have camps. The Army claimed to have killed about two hundred opposition fighters. The C.I.A. has apparently launched several drone strikes near Miran Shah and in other areas of the agency this week, reviving its secret air war over North Waziristan after a long period of quietude. These strikes were almost certainly commissioned and supported by Pakistan’s military and intelligence services; it would seem unthinkable for the Obama Administration to act unilaterally with drones just when Pakistan was at last doing what it had long urged.
Why now? The Karachi airport attack was a precipitating event, but there have been many such outrages. The deeper answer involves America’s impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to the military officers, advisers, and civilian analysts I’ve spoken to here.
I happened to be in Pakistan when Zarb-e-Azb began. The country’s proliferating cable news channels (absent the largest, Geo, which has been suspended temporarily for earlier broadcasting reports that the military found offensive) instantly rolled out colorful BREAKING NEWS and nation-at-war graphics that make Fox News look restrained. Animated tanks, fighter jets, and armed trucks zipped across the bottom of the TV screen at random moments during talk shows. As field reporters delivered standups in split-screen boxes, animated F-16s flew bombing runs, over and over, as if to induce hypnosis. The cartoon planes bombed into smithereens an artist’s rendering of a mud-walled desert compound.
In Islamabad, the 111th Infantry Brigade, known as the “coup brigade” because its proximity to the capital has led it to execute the Army’s periodic takeovers of government, has deployed with the paramilitary Rangers to strengthen the city’s defenses in the capital against an expected backlash of terrorist attacks. Islamabad was already a city that had gotten used to barbed wire, barricades, and checkpoints; now there are more of those, and more roving armed patrols as well.
The Army has cordoned off North Waziristan and imposed curfews while it attempts to evacuate tens of thousands of civilians to camps outside the tribal agency. If similar military campaigns carried out in recent years in South Waziristan, Swat, and Bajaur are any guide, North Waziristan’s residents, already among Pakistan’s very poorest, are in for a prolonged period of suffering as internal refugees.
North Waziristan lies across the border from the Afghan provinces of Khost and Paktia. For several years, Pakistan’s Army has been forecasting quietly that the American effort to quickly build the Afghan National Army from scratch into a fighting force of at least two hundred and fifty thousand would fail. Eventually, Pakistan’s military high command fears, the United States and its allies will grow tired of paying the Afghan Army’s huge salary and equipment bills (perhaps four billion dollars a year), and then the country’s Army and police will unravel into factional militias, much as Iraq’s American-trained Army has melted away under pressure during the past few weeks. Pakistan’s greatest concrete security concern is how such an Afghan unravelling might spill into its territory.
Afghanistan is in the midst of an uncertain election transition this year. The votes haven’t been counted in last weekend’s runoff round, but one of the two candidates, Abdullah Abdullah, has already alleged that there was fraud on a grand scale. The great majority of American troops will be gone by the end of 2014. Pakistan’s Army wanted to move in North Waziristan now so that it can push forward military defensive lines along its western border against the possible Afghan chaos to come.
Among other things, Pakistan’s generals fear what is sometimes referred to as the “reverse sanctuary” problem—that is, rather than Pakistan providing sanctuary for anti-Afghan fighters, as it has done for several decades, Afghanistan might become a durable sanctuary for anti-Pakistan groups. Indeed, the current chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Mullah Fazlullah, is said to be hiding out in northeastern Afghanistan, along with other armed radicals.
What of the Haqqani network, a tacit ally of Pakistan and a scourge of American generals in Afghanistan? The Haqqanis previously were the main instrument of Pakistan’s forward strategy in North Waziristan. They provided a loyal but imperfect front line—loyal because the Haqqanis studiously avoided attacking the Pakistani state, but imperfect because they harbored other groups that did hit Pakistan.
There is no reason to assume that Pakistan has turned on the Haqqanis. But the Army may prefer to push the network’s fighters, at least for a while, into eastern Afghanistan, where they also control territory. (They are, after all, Afghans.) The Haqqanis’ evacuation from their strongholds around Miran Shah would create space for Pakistan to attack the North Waziristan-rooted groups that it loathes most of all—the Uzbeks, Chechens, Uighurs (who spook Pakistan’s critical ally, China), and certain virulent and irreconcilable Pakistani Taliban. According to Pakistani intelligence estimates, there may be about two thousand Uzbek fighters and hundreds of Punjabi Taliban in North Waziristan today—those groups alone promise tough going.
Pakistan gained independence in 1947. It left Waziristan alone until 2002, when the Pakistani Army entered in force for the first time, also at American urging. That incursion began falteringly, but more recently the Army has gained confidence and some measure of stability in South Waziristan, if hardly a victory. The Army would like to pull back and put civilian administrators and perhaps political parties in the lead. But Pakistan’s civil government is too weak, and Waziristan’s insurgent, criminal, and terrorist networks are too deep to expect normalcy anytime soon. Even in the best of circumstances, Pakistan’s military occupation of all of Waziristan now looks to be a multi-decade project, akin to the Indian occupation of Kashmir or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank—a heavy load on a state that already has too many.
Photograph by Shakil Adil/AP.
dont like the last paragraph......
fatman17
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وطن باقی رھے یہ زندگی تو ٓانی جانی ھے
یہی اللہ کے شیروں کا طرز زندگانی ھے
this is in bad taste...
North Waziristan Offensive
- Senior Leaders of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) confirmed on July 3 that Mullah Fazlullah, leader of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), traveled to North Waziristan a few days before the start of Operation Zarb-e-Azb. Fazlullah allegedly visited to brief the TTP leadership in the area on the upcoming military operation and to assure them that they would be accommodated in Afghanistan. Senior members of the TTP and a leading member of the North Waziristan tribal Jirga confirmed the reports. Fazlullah reportedly met with Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur and requested he join the TTP in fighting Pakistani forces, an offer Bahadur is said to have refused. Fazlullah reportedly met with different Taliban commanders in Datta Khel, Miram Shah and Mir Ali sub-districts along with the TTP chief for Mohmand Agency, Maulvi Omar Khalid Khurasani. Fazlullah also met with Haqqani Network, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Punjabi Taliban and al Qaeda members in the area. Haqqani Network leaders also allegedly rejected his offer to attack Pakistani forces but promised to contact him if they needed support in Afghanistan. Fazlullah also reportedly requested that militant commanders move to safe locations in advance of the operation.[1]
- The Pakistan Army reported that on July 2 that security forces cleared three additional improvised explosive device (IED) factories containing a large amount of explosives, anti-tank mines, a suicide bomber training center, a media facility and a cache of rockets in North Waziristan Agency. Security forces also discovered and dismantled six IEDs attached to four computers in a private hotel in the same undisclosed area.[2]
- According to The News, suspected militants planted an IED on July 1 that killed two Pakistan Army soldiers. Militants placed the bomb on Bypass Road in Mir Ali sub-district and the bomb hit a convoy of Pakistan Army soldiers on their way to the city of Mir Ali from Khajori checkpoint in North Waziristan Agency.[3]
- Dawn reported that six bodies were discovered on July 3 in the Harmaz area of Mir Ali sub-district in North Waziristan Agency. Neither the identities of the bodies nor the circumstances surrounding their death could be ascertained.[4]
- On July 3, former Director General of the army’s Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), Major Gen. (retd.) Athar Abbas urged Pakistani security forces to focus on eliminating militants in Pakistan’s major cities along with North Waziristan to ensure the success of Operation Zarb-e-Azb. He also warned security forces of the possibility of a militant counter-attack following the military operation.[5]
Jazzbot
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I posted it in good spirit, my apologies though if you think its in bad taste. I can take it down if you want. No disrespect to the soldier was intended.
TheFlyingPretzel
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Please do. Thanks.
saiyan0321
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On news now that 13 terrorists killed in air force bombing in NW. Hell is asking for many many more.
qaisar52
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No need to be apologized. And This picture is a slap to the face to TTP and their supports. "Tum Kitnay Hussaini Maroo gay Har Gher say Hussaini Niklay ga" In This Hussaini means the Sprit of Imam Hussain and His followers. We slute you Ya shaheed. We are proud of you.
DANGER-ZONE
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Tum Shiaon k pass firqawarana fasad phailanay k ilawa kuch nahi hota post kernay k lye ?
qaisar52
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You people are very good, running in BurKa's......... And Following Imam Hussain does not mean the person is shia. if in your it is then yes. We are Shias. You follow yazeed and get lannat till Judgement day.
Don't worry sir, Pak army is doing quite well, will make sure a regular delivery of these rats to the Hell.
DANGER-ZONE
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lol ... Hold your horses Shiate ... This ain't Syria or Iraq and this is no SHIA - SUNI war, so keep you Hussiani and Yezeedi ideology to yourself and get your a$$ to Iraq or Syria if you so wana fight a Husaiani - Yazeedi war.
Spare this thread for Operation Zarb-e-Azb updates.
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