Another good piece from Jason Burke and the Guardian:
An old army in a new war
The Pakistani army is engaged in a gritty battle with Afghan militants in a border area where it has never had authority. Jason Burke reports from Loesam
Pakistani army soldiers in Bajaur. Photograph: Jason Burke/Observer
Loesam is a long way from anywhere. Once a small town in north-west Pakistan, on the Afghanistan frontier, it has been razed to the ground. The bazaar is a pile of rubble, homes scraped down to their concrete foundations. The only building still upright is the mosque that stands in the corner of what once was the local petrol station. The population has fled.
A few hundred metres out of Loesam, the 25th Punjab regiment of the Pakistani army is digging in. Those few hundred metres were seized the day before in a short, sharp engagement with militants entrenched in mud-walled compounds, stands of slim ash, birch trees and dry valleys with their yellow dust walls on their outskirts.
Heavy machine guns and mortars still trade fire with militants on the outskirts of the town - a few miles from Khar, the administrative capital of the Bajaur agency - dropping shells just a few hundred metres from where Colonel Javed Baluch drinks tea with an unsettling insouciance while ordering artillery strikes on a pink plastic field telephone.
Nine years ago I spent a week with the Pakistani army engaged in a scruffy little war with India on their eastern frontier. Now they are engaged in a similarly gritty, unglamorous, ill-defined battle with Islamic militants on their western borders.
Many of the officers fighting around Loesam are convinced that their old enemy, the Indians, are financing and organising the extremists that they have so far lost 84 men fighting. This conviction is rooted in a traditional distrust of their regional rival, their own answer to the question "who stands to gain from Pakistan's weakness?", and perhaps because it is easier, in psychological terms, to kill fellow-citizens and fellow Muslims in large numbers if they are believed to be in the pay of a foreign power.
The militants are largely local men from the Bajaur tribal agency one of Pakistan's federally administered tribal areas - reinforced with contingents of Afghans and extremists from further afield. That they are dying in large numbers is undoubted. I watched as a Cobra attack helicopter, supplied by the Americans, hovered above one village, rattling rockets and huge rounds from rotating guns into compounds.
"The first few dozen or so bother you," the 38-year-old pilot later told me. "But when you've killed hundreds or thousands, you stop worrying. And anyway, I just need to think about the videos these guys put out every week or so showing how they decapitate my friends and comrades."
How is the Pakistani army different after a decade? I could see two changes: some new equipment, purchased with American money, and a new mentality infused with new ideas - that Mossad or the CIA are responsible for 9-11, that the west is set on keeping Islamic nations weak, for example that few held 10 years ago. Such ideas are most common among the middle ranks. In another decade, many such men will have been promoted.
But there is much continuity, too. The heritage of the British empire is still strong. Officers are predominantly from the Punjab region, on the other side of the country from where they are currently fighting. They do not speak the language of their enemy, literally and figuratively. Many of their men, particularly those of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, are locally recruited.
The second world war vintage artillery that I saw in action a decade ago has been replaced but the clear divisions separating officers from enlisted men inherited from former colonial overlords have not.
Gunner commanders still direct fire from rear bases while playing cricket and admit it with a laugh to their commanding officers and when I scuttle across open ground into a recently captured compound I am immediately offered tea in porcelain cups and saucers with biscuits on a tray. 
A mile or so from the headquarters of the military operation in Khar, the administrative capital of the Bajaur agency, are the offices of the political agent - the representative of the Pakistani government in this constitutionally semi-autonomous land. Shafi Rullah Wazir sits in his guarded compound and liaises with the local tribes. Recently these tribes have built up lashkars - informal militias - and have taken on the militants themselves.
Shafi Rullah is from South Waziristan, another tribal agency to the south which has also seen fierce fighting. One thing that the local tribes do not lack is firepower. Legally they all have the right to bear arms. "We all have weapons," he says, grinning widely. "Back in my village, in my home alone I have four Kalashnikov and a rocket launcher."
The Pakistani army officers refer to the militants as "miscreants" a slightly less loaded term than "terrorists". It is an interesting lexicographical way of demilitarising what is currently an almost purely military operation. The Americans across the frontier in Afghanistan have been blocking the passes with sensor devices and local troops to cut off the flow of reinforcements and supplies. There are frequent meetings between the commanders on either side of the frontier. Winter is coming, which will help when the snow falls.
Back in Loesam, as the rhythm with which the mortar shells crack into buildings on a nearby ridge starts to intensify and the small arms fire from the militants starts to get more accurate, pinging and whipping over our heads, Colonel Baluch tells me the aim of the war is to "restore the writ of the government". No government has ever had much authority here. This is going to be a long war.
Pakistan-Afghan conflict: An old enemy in a new war | World news | guardian.co.uk
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Love the pink field telephone by the way. My first impression was that they snagged it from one of the abandoned houses or militant hideouts, 'standard issue' eh?
