Pak Army kills 30 militants in South Waziristan attack
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Had you heard US has started backing some planning these attacks to break the peace deal i cant post the details (classified)
But lets Pak Army take some cauciouse measures.
But lets Pak Army take some cauciouse measures.
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Welcome to Taleban country
A red truck comes to a screeching halt next to our vehicle.
Its heavily-tinted windows are lowered to reveal an interior packed with more men than can possibly fit in a vehicle that size.
All have beards and long hair. Another bunch is huddled against each other in the open back of the four-wheel drive.
"Wait for us here. We will come back," the young driver issues us with a curt order.
Seconds later he is gone - bewildered tribesmen in the main bazaar try to make sense of what is going on.
Welcome to Mir Ali, a small town in Pakistan's restive tribal area of North Waziristan often frequented by local pro-Taleban militants.
Our hosts are Baitullah Mehsud's group, their leader a local equivalent of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taleban.
Baitullah is believed to head the pro-Taleban militants in the half of South Waziristan dominated by the Mehsud tribe.
He is generally referred to as ameer (chief) sahib and his influence, it seems, spreads far beyond the Mehsud territory.
The militants return after a while. "Ameer sahib sends his greetings too," they inform us, asking the small media group to follow them.
Baitullah had invited a group of journalists to visit the site in South Waziristan bombed by the Pakistani military last week. The army says the place was an al-Qaeda hideout.
Pakistan's military and the local tribesmen agree that the early morning operation took out eight people and injured several others. But they strongly disagree on who the victims were.
The government says they were foreign terrorists, while the militants say they were innocent local wood-cutters.
"Our ameer wants you to see the truth and judge for yourself," says Zulfiqar Mehsud, the youngish leader of the militants packed in the vehicle.
"We want you to see the injustice Pakistan is doing to us."
In this mountainous region - where the tribes people used to enjoy virtual autonomy - Pakistani security forces fought fierce battles with local militants until a peace deal in September last year.
They were travelling with two rocket launchers, a heavy machine gun and an AK-47 assault rifle each with no dearth of ammunition
Since the controversial deal, militants seem to have tightened their hold on the region. They say they can now move around freely.
The paramilitary forces and local police are only to be seen in their posts. There is no visible patrolling on the streets.
We dutifully followed the militants on a road heading south from Mir Ali.
Our vehicle zigzagged over a bumpy road through dry plains and green valleys. I asked and was allowed to switch over to the militants' truck.
They were travelling with two rocket launchers, a heavy machine gun and an AK-47 assault rifle each with no dearth of ammunition. Two bags full of ammunition and hand grenades hung from the back of the front seats.
One of the militants pulled out an American AK-47. "It's war booty. We seized it in Afghanistan," he said proudly.
Looking around, I felt I could have been in an arms depot.
"We've to carry all this stuff around all the time. You know the situation. Anything can happen any time," explained an older-looking militant called Malaka by his colleagues.
Another militant, Khan Sher, sitting next to me had been shot in the leg in Afghanistan. He was operated upon but still had a limp. Not that it seemed to affect his active participation in militant activities.
The atmosphere in the vehicle was a bit stiff and hostile in the beginning but we all relaxed after a brief chat in Pashto.
On the way, they stopped to demonstrate their firing skills. We were also offered the chance to try our hands at a heavy machine gun.
The next stop was for afternoon prayers on the bank of a stream. Everyone had to pray.
Under a heavily overcast sky, the noise of a spy drone broke the silence as the prayers ended. "An American drone," Zulfiqar Mehsud told us.
Back on the road, the militants put on a cassette with nothing but noise and screeches on it. They claimed it helped avoid detection by American spy planes.
The small speaker on the vehicle's roof was deafening and we immediately requested that the cassette be stopped. It was replaced with Pashto chants eulogising jihad and cursing infidels.
The three-vehicle convoy arrived three hours later at Kot Kalay, a small hamlet of high mud houses perched on a hilltop in South Waziristan. Journalists were taken to the main mosque to see the waiting relatives of the people who had died in the attack.
All of them, in the presence of the militants, described the attack as cruel.
"We don't demand any compensation or anything. They have killed innocent people, we will not spare them. We will take revenge," said an agitated Mir Shah Azam Khan, whose 16-year-old son was among the dead.
After a cup of extremely sweet tea, we headed for the site of the raid. In the barren landscape around, the compounds that the Pakistan army had bombed were the only settlements.
Three of the five houses stood on a hill surrounded by higher mountains on all sides - a scene typical of tribal territory.
Local traders told us that only wood-cutters working in the surrounding forests used to spend nights in these high-walled compounds.
The remains of an unexploded 500-pound missile and other bombs were shown to the media. Body parts of the dead were also on display.
Some reports suggest the raid was conducted on the basis of information that a senior al-Qaeda leader Abu Nasser, and some other foreigners, were present in the village.
He is reported to have been wounded but still managed to escape. No official confirmation was available.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/6291737.stm
A red truck comes to a screeching halt next to our vehicle.
Its heavily-tinted windows are lowered to reveal an interior packed with more men than can possibly fit in a vehicle that size.
All have beards and long hair. Another bunch is huddled against each other in the open back of the four-wheel drive.
"Wait for us here. We will come back," the young driver issues us with a curt order.
Seconds later he is gone - bewildered tribesmen in the main bazaar try to make sense of what is going on.
Welcome to Mir Ali, a small town in Pakistan's restive tribal area of North Waziristan often frequented by local pro-Taleban militants.
Our hosts are Baitullah Mehsud's group, their leader a local equivalent of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taleban.
Baitullah is believed to head the pro-Taleban militants in the half of South Waziristan dominated by the Mehsud tribe.
He is generally referred to as ameer (chief) sahib and his influence, it seems, spreads far beyond the Mehsud territory.
The militants return after a while. "Ameer sahib sends his greetings too," they inform us, asking the small media group to follow them.
Baitullah had invited a group of journalists to visit the site in South Waziristan bombed by the Pakistani military last week. The army says the place was an al-Qaeda hideout.
Pakistan's military and the local tribesmen agree that the early morning operation took out eight people and injured several others. But they strongly disagree on who the victims were.
The government says they were foreign terrorists, while the militants say they were innocent local wood-cutters.
"Our ameer wants you to see the truth and judge for yourself," says Zulfiqar Mehsud, the youngish leader of the militants packed in the vehicle.
"We want you to see the injustice Pakistan is doing to us."
In this mountainous region - where the tribes people used to enjoy virtual autonomy - Pakistani security forces fought fierce battles with local militants until a peace deal in September last year.
They were travelling with two rocket launchers, a heavy machine gun and an AK-47 assault rifle each with no dearth of ammunition
Since the controversial deal, militants seem to have tightened their hold on the region. They say they can now move around freely.
The paramilitary forces and local police are only to be seen in their posts. There is no visible patrolling on the streets.
We dutifully followed the militants on a road heading south from Mir Ali.
Our vehicle zigzagged over a bumpy road through dry plains and green valleys. I asked and was allowed to switch over to the militants' truck.
They were travelling with two rocket launchers, a heavy machine gun and an AK-47 assault rifle each with no dearth of ammunition. Two bags full of ammunition and hand grenades hung from the back of the front seats.
One of the militants pulled out an American AK-47. "It's war booty. We seized it in Afghanistan," he said proudly.
Looking around, I felt I could have been in an arms depot.
"We've to carry all this stuff around all the time. You know the situation. Anything can happen any time," explained an older-looking militant called Malaka by his colleagues.
Another militant, Khan Sher, sitting next to me had been shot in the leg in Afghanistan. He was operated upon but still had a limp. Not that it seemed to affect his active participation in militant activities.
The atmosphere in the vehicle was a bit stiff and hostile in the beginning but we all relaxed after a brief chat in Pashto.
On the way, they stopped to demonstrate their firing skills. We were also offered the chance to try our hands at a heavy machine gun.
The next stop was for afternoon prayers on the bank of a stream. Everyone had to pray.
Under a heavily overcast sky, the noise of a spy drone broke the silence as the prayers ended. "An American drone," Zulfiqar Mehsud told us.
Back on the road, the militants put on a cassette with nothing but noise and screeches on it. They claimed it helped avoid detection by American spy planes.
The small speaker on the vehicle's roof was deafening and we immediately requested that the cassette be stopped. It was replaced with Pashto chants eulogising jihad and cursing infidels.
The three-vehicle convoy arrived three hours later at Kot Kalay, a small hamlet of high mud houses perched on a hilltop in South Waziristan. Journalists were taken to the main mosque to see the waiting relatives of the people who had died in the attack.
All of them, in the presence of the militants, described the attack as cruel.
"We don't demand any compensation or anything. They have killed innocent people, we will not spare them. We will take revenge," said an agitated Mir Shah Azam Khan, whose 16-year-old son was among the dead.
After a cup of extremely sweet tea, we headed for the site of the raid. In the barren landscape around, the compounds that the Pakistan army had bombed were the only settlements.
Three of the five houses stood on a hill surrounded by higher mountains on all sides - a scene typical of tribal territory.
Local traders told us that only wood-cutters working in the surrounding forests used to spend nights in these high-walled compounds.
The remains of an unexploded 500-pound missile and other bombs were shown to the media. Body parts of the dead were also on display.
Some reports suggest the raid was conducted on the basis of information that a senior al-Qaeda leader Abu Nasser, and some other foreigners, were present in the village.
He is reported to have been wounded but still managed to escape. No official confirmation was available.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/6291737.stm
This is what needs to happen....not the crappy "beat the Talib/Pashtun into submission" tactics which are bound to fail. Idiots in NATO/ISAF/US would do good if they were to read this article over and over.
Winning the peace in Afghanistan
With the war with the Taliban bogging down, Pakistan appears receptive to new ideas
January 26, 2007
Jonathan Power
ISLAMABAD–Pervez Musharraf, president and military strongman of Pakistan, opened his eyes wide, sat bolt upright on his sofa, and said, "I never thought of that." He repeated the phrase and looked, I dare to suggest, a little bewildered. In many years of interviewing top leaders I have never before felt the sensation of catching someone totally off balance. Yet all I had asked was:
"Why don't you talk to your enemies, the Taliban and Al Qaeda?"
In two hours of conversation there was no effort, as is usual with senior Pakistani officials, to persuade me that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were being defeated or that the war in Afghanistan was going well. Indeed, there was an absence of bravado and a receptivity to new, unconsidered, ideas.
Pakistan is the hub of the Anglo-American/NATO war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The British have here their largest embassy in the world. The city is full to the brim with American secret agents and senior military people.
But the truth is the war in Afghanistan is going badly. The Taliban is gaining the upper hand, financially fuelled by proceeds from poppy growing, which they now encourage in a reverse of policy when they were in power, when they ruled that it was unIslamic. Al Qaeda, too, high up in the mountains of Pakistan, is rebuilding its strength.
In different ways both the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan are besieged.
President Hamid Karzai appears to realize that the Western forces are losing ground to the Taliban and that he is unable to do much about the infiltration of fresh warriors from Pakistan.
Musharraf, for his part, is throwing some 80,000 troops into the frontier areas.
But with the militants finding it all too easy to hide in the refugee camps on Pakistani soil, where 2.5 million mainly Pashtun Afghan refugees live, and with both Afghanistan and the West pouring scorn on his suggestion that he mine and fence the border, the battle is uphill with heavy losses on the Pakistani side.
Meanwhile, support grows in Pakistan for the militants. As a former Pakistani ambassador, Tariq Fatemi, wrote recently in the Karachi newspaper Dawn, brute force tactics that have often killed women and children and destroyed homes and crops have been counterproductive. "The impression has gained ground among the tribes that we are oblivious to their lives and interests."
On both sides of the border are the Pashtuns, arguably the world's most adept fighting people. They call the shots.
The Pashtuns have been the standard-bearers of Afghan nationalism ever since the state came into being 250 years ago. One invasion, British or Soviet or American, is just like another.
It is mandatory in the Pashtun code of honour for an insult to be avenged. As the saying goes, "A Pashtun waited 100 years and then took his revenge – it was quick work."
Only by entering into negotiations to compensate for lives and dishonour done to the deceased, the maimed and insulted can the mutual reinforcing cycle of violence be curtailed.
A jirga (tribal council), which brings together the Taliban, Kabul, Islamabad and Pakistani's northern tribes, each with equal representation, must begin a dialogue toward a ceasefire. The Taliban will insist on a timetable for withdrawal of U.S./NATO troops.
We should not fear the Afghan Taliban. Mullah Omar's interview in January suggests he is distancing himself from Osama bin Laden.
Not one Afghan has been associated with any terror attacks on the West. Bin Laden, assuming he and his men are in Pakistan, can no longer easily finance or mastermind terrorism from a remote cave. He should be finished off by careful police work. Al Qaeda operatives are paying locals in dollars for protection, Musharraf told me. That should leave a kind of paper trail.
As for the harsher side of would-be Taliban rule: Let Pashtun culture work on that over time. The Pashtun zeitgeist, as another Dawn writer, M.P. Bhandara, suggests, "does not offer democracy but it does stress personal autonomy and equality."
This is why I proposed to Musharraf that he talk to the Taliban, even to Al Qaeda. "No one has ever suggested that," he added. "You have a point. I must think about it." I also suggested he engage in less "bang-bang" and more economic and social development in the alienated border villages. He did not demur.
Finally, I said, quoting a column by Maia Szalavitz in the International Herald Tribune from January last year, why not persuade the international community to buy up the poppy crop direct from the peasants and use it for badly needed medicinal purposes, undercutting both the mafia and the Taliban's source of funds?
"I have never thought of that either," he said. "Yes, perhaps we could. Let's cost it and see if it is practical."
Thinking the unthinkable would be a useful start.
Jonathan Power is an international affairs writer based in Britain. He is the author of Vision Of Hope, a history of the United Nations.
http://www.thestar.com/article/175027
Winning the peace in Afghanistan
With the war with the Taliban bogging down, Pakistan appears receptive to new ideas
January 26, 2007
Jonathan Power
ISLAMABAD–Pervez Musharraf, president and military strongman of Pakistan, opened his eyes wide, sat bolt upright on his sofa, and said, "I never thought of that." He repeated the phrase and looked, I dare to suggest, a little bewildered. In many years of interviewing top leaders I have never before felt the sensation of catching someone totally off balance. Yet all I had asked was:
"Why don't you talk to your enemies, the Taliban and Al Qaeda?"
In two hours of conversation there was no effort, as is usual with senior Pakistani officials, to persuade me that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were being defeated or that the war in Afghanistan was going well. Indeed, there was an absence of bravado and a receptivity to new, unconsidered, ideas.
Pakistan is the hub of the Anglo-American/NATO war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The British have here their largest embassy in the world. The city is full to the brim with American secret agents and senior military people.
But the truth is the war in Afghanistan is going badly. The Taliban is gaining the upper hand, financially fuelled by proceeds from poppy growing, which they now encourage in a reverse of policy when they were in power, when they ruled that it was unIslamic. Al Qaeda, too, high up in the mountains of Pakistan, is rebuilding its strength.
In different ways both the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan are besieged.
President Hamid Karzai appears to realize that the Western forces are losing ground to the Taliban and that he is unable to do much about the infiltration of fresh warriors from Pakistan.
Musharraf, for his part, is throwing some 80,000 troops into the frontier areas.
But with the militants finding it all too easy to hide in the refugee camps on Pakistani soil, where 2.5 million mainly Pashtun Afghan refugees live, and with both Afghanistan and the West pouring scorn on his suggestion that he mine and fence the border, the battle is uphill with heavy losses on the Pakistani side.
Meanwhile, support grows in Pakistan for the militants. As a former Pakistani ambassador, Tariq Fatemi, wrote recently in the Karachi newspaper Dawn, brute force tactics that have often killed women and children and destroyed homes and crops have been counterproductive. "The impression has gained ground among the tribes that we are oblivious to their lives and interests."
On both sides of the border are the Pashtuns, arguably the world's most adept fighting people. They call the shots.
The Pashtuns have been the standard-bearers of Afghan nationalism ever since the state came into being 250 years ago. One invasion, British or Soviet or American, is just like another.
It is mandatory in the Pashtun code of honour for an insult to be avenged. As the saying goes, "A Pashtun waited 100 years and then took his revenge – it was quick work."
Only by entering into negotiations to compensate for lives and dishonour done to the deceased, the maimed and insulted can the mutual reinforcing cycle of violence be curtailed.
A jirga (tribal council), which brings together the Taliban, Kabul, Islamabad and Pakistani's northern tribes, each with equal representation, must begin a dialogue toward a ceasefire. The Taliban will insist on a timetable for withdrawal of U.S./NATO troops.
We should not fear the Afghan Taliban. Mullah Omar's interview in January suggests he is distancing himself from Osama bin Laden.
Not one Afghan has been associated with any terror attacks on the West. Bin Laden, assuming he and his men are in Pakistan, can no longer easily finance or mastermind terrorism from a remote cave. He should be finished off by careful police work. Al Qaeda operatives are paying locals in dollars for protection, Musharraf told me. That should leave a kind of paper trail.
As for the harsher side of would-be Taliban rule: Let Pashtun culture work on that over time. The Pashtun zeitgeist, as another Dawn writer, M.P. Bhandara, suggests, "does not offer democracy but it does stress personal autonomy and equality."
This is why I proposed to Musharraf that he talk to the Taliban, even to Al Qaeda. "No one has ever suggested that," he added. "You have a point. I must think about it." I also suggested he engage in less "bang-bang" and more economic and social development in the alienated border villages. He did not demur.
Finally, I said, quoting a column by Maia Szalavitz in the International Herald Tribune from January last year, why not persuade the international community to buy up the poppy crop direct from the peasants and use it for badly needed medicinal purposes, undercutting both the mafia and the Taliban's source of funds?
"I have never thought of that either," he said. "Yes, perhaps we could. Let's cost it and see if it is practical."
Thinking the unthinkable would be a useful start.
Jonathan Power is an international affairs writer based in Britain. He is the author of Vision Of Hope, a history of the United Nations.
http://www.thestar.com/article/175027
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