Category: Global War on Terror

Survivors of the Swat massacre

Fleeing refugees
Families flee from an army offensive against Taliban militants in the Shamuzai area of Pakistan's Swat Valley yesterday. More than half a million refugees have been registered (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

They have walked for days, forsaking their homes to escape Pakistan’s campaign against the Taliban. And these refugees are the lucky ones. Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich report from Swabi.

The old woman fell to her knees in the dust, her arms covering her head to show how she had tried to hide as the shells fell around them. “There was so much noise and chaos,” said the woman, Shirina, who said she was 80. “We walked over the hills on foot. Then we hired a car.” Asked if the bombardment had caused any casualties, she and her family responded as one: “The world was killed. Lots of people were killed. Too many.”

Two days earlier, the family from Pakistan’s Buner district had arrived in this makeshift refugee camp after fleeing the military’s increasingly forceful battle with Taliban militants. There are hundreds of thousands like them, driven from the war zone, and they tell similar tales of fear, anguish and loss. They talk too, of an unknown number of civilians being killed in what is in effect a hidden war.

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Obama’s Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Sober advice for Obama from Graham E. Fuller, former CIA station chief in Kabul and author of The Future of Political Islam.

For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.

— Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

— The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban — like them or not — as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

— It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.

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Becoming What We Seek to Destroy

Gates and soldiers
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, left, takes part in a re-enlistment ceremony for eight U.S. troops during his visit to Forward Operating Base Airborne in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, last week.

Chris Hedges on the futility of the Afghan war.

The bodies of dozens, perhaps well over a hundred, women, children and men, their corpses blown into bits of human flesh by iron fragmentation bombs dropped by U.S. warplanes in a village in the western province of Farah, illustrates the futility of the Afghan war. We are not delivering democracy or liberation or development. We are delivering massive, sophisticated forms of industrial slaughter. And because we have employed the blunt and horrible instrument of war in a land we know little about and are incapable of reading, we embody the barbarism we claim to be seeking to defeat.

We are morally no different from the psychopaths within the Taliban, who Afghans remember we empowered, funded and armed during the 10-year war with the Soviet Union. Acid thrown a girl’s face or beheadings? Death delivered from the air or fields of shiny cluster bombs? This is the language of war. It is what we speak. It is what those we fight speak.

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Confusion over Taliban muddies the issues in Pakistan

Refugees Flee Fighting in North-West Frontier Province
A man sits at a camp in Mardan, Pakistan, for those who fled the military offensive in Swat Valley, where helicopters and jets are pounding militant positions. Militants reportedly fired rockets at an army base in Mingora. (Daniel Berehulak / Getty Images)

‘Are fighters religious zealots, thugs or revolutionaries? The perceptions of the public, leaders and U.S. are at odds’, writes Mark Magnier, ‘but the overriding sentiment in Pakistan is that “America created this problem”‘. (thanks Tina)

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan — Islamic militants who burn schools and threaten women in the name of religious purity. A righteous force battling corrupt and venal officials. Or gun-waving gangsters who conceal their crimes under a banner of spiritual renewal.

Weeks of turmoil have made it appear as though a unified Taliban is on the march out of the wild northwest, staking out strategic ground for an assault on Pakistan’s heartland.

But who exactly the Taliban is may rest in the eye of the beholder.

Many Pakistanis don’t see the Taliban as much of a threat and are not eager for a confrontation. On the other hand, oversimplification may lead policymakers toward a one-size-fits-all solution that is ineffective — or even counterproductive.

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‘I’m here to understand what you mean by Taliban’

Celebrated Indian author and social activist Arundhati Roy addresses a gathering at the Karachi Press Club on Friday.-Photo WhiteStar/Fahim Siddiqui

Salman Siddiqui on Arundhati Roy’s address at the Karachi Press Club. (It looks like a bad transcript.)

Is there a threat of Talibanisation engulfing the entire region?

I think it has already engulfed our region. I think there’s a need for a very clear thinking (on this issue of Talibanisation). In India, there are two kinds of terrorism: one is Islamic terrorism and the other Maoist terrorism. But this term terrorism, we must ask, what do they mean by it.

In Pakistan, I’m here to understand what they mean by this term. When we say we must fight the Taliban or must defeat them, what does it mean? I’m here to understand what you mean when you say Taliban. Do you mean a militant? Do you mean an ideology? Exactly what is it that is being fought? That needs to be clarified.

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The biggest human flood since 1947

Refugee camp near Mardan
Children line up to receive food in a refugee camp near Mardan. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP

The United States has doubled military aid to Pakistan. Kamal Hyder of Al Jazeera reports that a ‘big catastrophe is unfolding in the Northwest Frontier Province – I have never seen anything on this scale…This is a huge humanitarian crisis; the largest number of internally displaced people in the world, and in the smallest possible time…Anger is growing that the government did not give the citizens adequate warning to escape…Many people are saying their government has abandoned them … what is unfolding here is the tip of the iceberg, the worst is yet to come.’

According to Al Jazeera:

Bodies were reported to be lying in roads, homes reduced to ruins and people left cowering with no means of escape after the military imposed curfews across the region amid the fighting…Hyder reported that those who have fled the fighting are in refugee camps and receiving little government help.

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East Pakistan Redux

Pakistani Refugees flee fighting between Pakistan Army forces and the Taliban
Buner refugees travel by road as they flee fighting between the Pakistan army and the Taliban near Swabi, Pakistan. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Pakistan faces full scale war against the Taliban. ‘The Pakistani army are readying for an urban battle unprecedented in the short history of its battle against the Taliban’, Sana al Haq and Declan Walsh report. And we all know how urban battle’s end. (thanks Domenyk)

(This report curiously reproduces some of the same language and even the same interviewee from an earlier AP report without attribution.)

The skiing season at Malam Jabba, Pakistan‘s only ski resort, is over. Yesterday the pistes echoed with the sound of explosions as fighter jets screamed overhead, part of the Pakistan military’s intensifying campaign to dislodge the Taliban from the Swat Valley.

An hour’s drive away in Mingora, the war-racked valley’s main town, the Taliban and army are readying for an urban battle unprecedented in the short history of Pakistan’s battle against the Taliban.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, today said the army was fighting for “the survival of the country”, speaking after an emergency cabinet meeting.

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Cynicism among Pakistani refugees

Internal refugees in the camp in Swabi
Displaced families in Swabi are living in tents supplied by the UN

The Pakistani Prime Minister now appears to have borrowed Hillary Clinton’s language as to how much of a threat the ‘Taliban’ pose to the country’s survival. This in my view is very myopic, and could easily turn into a self fufilling prophecy. As is evident from the following BBC report, the people may not like the ‘Taliban’, but they like the military even less. I find it unlikely that state will ever recover from the illwill it has sown.

The tent cities are growing in the district of Swabi, in north-west Pakistan: swelled with the thousands fleeing the fighting in nearby Buner district.

Last month, Taleban from the troubled district of Swat moved south into Buner and overran it, occupying government offices and police stations, and closing down locally popular Sufi shrines which they oppose.

The army moved in a couple of weeks ago to counter them, and is now engaged in heavy fighting in the area.

According to Shahram Khan, the head of Swabi district government, around 150,000 people have fled Buner during the last few days. This is three times the figure of 40,000 previously provided by the federal government.

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Swat fighting threatens Pakistan army unity

The fighting between the Pakistani army and the Taliban in Swat valley can have great ramifications for the country.

If casualty figures rise to unacceptable levels, both from a military and a public point of view, the fear is that it could divide the army as well as the nation.

Al Jazeera’s Sohail Rahman reports from Islamabad.

A Catastrophe Foretold

Pakistani refugees fleeing fighting in Swat, Buner and Lower Dir queue for rations in a relief camp at Mardan yesterday (DANIEL BEREHULAK/GETTY IMAGES)

There is an exodus of Pakistani civilians as battle against Taleban rages, Zahid Hussain reports. They may yet succeed, but it appears no one seems to have told the Pakistani government the first rule of counterinsurgency: it is not the driving out of opposition that constitutes success, it is the ability to hold on the gains. The militants could have been neutralized through the use of sparing and targeted force in conjunction with a political settlement. This one is guaranteed to backfire.

With jet fighters screeching overhead, tens of thousands of people fled Pakistan’s once-idyllic Swat Valley yesterday, increasing a humanitarian crisis that threatens to undermine public support for the military campaign against the Taleban.

The UN says that more than 200,000 people have left Swat in the past few days, and another 300,000 are on the move or trying to leave after the collapse of a three-month-old peace deal between the Government and the Islamists this week. They will join the estimated 555,000 who have fled other conflict zones in northwestern Pakistan since August, taking the total number of displaced people in the region to more than one million.

As government forces claimed to have killed 143 militants since Thursday, The Times spoke to dozens of refugees arriving — bedraggled, exhausted and crammed into buses, vans and trucks — at a makeshift camp in Jalala, just outside Swat.

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