bobdina
10-19-2009, 03:16 PM
Pakistan
10/19/2009
An Offensive Against the Taliban
Under Pressure, Pakistani Army Pushes into South Waziristan
By SPIEGEL Staff
An unprecedented wave of suicide bombings in recent weeks underscored the strength of the Islamic extremists entrenched in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Over the weekend, the Pakistani army fought back with a long awaited ground and air offensive.
Nothing works anymore in Islamabad. Normally the Pakistani capital, with its broad streets intersecting at right angles, is not one of Asia's typically gridlocked big cities. But now it takes hours to traverse. Terrorism is to blame.
Everyone is determined to prevent the next attack. A policeman on a motorcycle passes a white pickup truck and motions to the driver to pull over to the left side of the street. "I want to take a look at your truck bed," he says. The driver, a young man, jumps out, walks to the back of the truck and pulls back the plastic tarp covering the bed. "It's just soil, for my father's garden," he says. The police officer examines the load for a moment before indicating that the driver can continue on his way.
Other security forces have been stopping other vehicles at the same time. Some are forced to park in the middle of the street because there is no room on the shoulder. Within a few minutes, traffic is backed up by several hundred meters.
Of course, the residents of the capital of a high-risk country like Pakistan are used to security checks. In most cases, however, police have only set up roadblocks on major streets in the downtown area.
But now there is scrutiny at every corner, and it is being performed by all security forces. The police, military and paramilitary groups have occupied a city brimming with rumors. There is even talk that the terrorists are planning an attack on the parliament. With attacks occurring on a daily basis, such rumors no longer seem implausible.
Late last week, security had also been tightened at the airport. The only reason passengers were still being processed relatively smoothly was that travelers were now arriving at the airport several hours before their scheduled departures. Only one destination was shown in red on the arrivals and departures screen: Dera Ismail Khan. All flights in and out of the city in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, near the Waziristan region, had been cancelled. It was clear something was about to happen.
Army Launches Long-Anticipated Offensive
On Saturday, the Pakistani army moved into the region to begin a long-anticipated offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan. The Pakistani army's offensive is aimed at eliminating Pakistani Taliban militants tied to the Mehsud tribe. The tribe controls about half of the region. The United States had been pressuring Pakistan to crack down on extremists, who have used the area as a base for attacks against Western troops in neighboring Afghanistan. The Mehsud tribe are blamed for as much as 80 percent of the suicide attacks that have taken place in Pakistan over the last three years, including a number of attacks in recent weeks.
The army has said the operation -- which is comprised of large numbers of ground troops and air support from F-16 fighter jets and helicopter gun ships-- could last for two months. More than 28,000 soldiers are involved in the operation, and they are pitted against as many as 10,000 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. During the first few days of fighting, Pakistani army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said 78 insurgents had been killed as well as nine soldiers, although it is difficult to independently verify those figures.
The offensive has been in the planning for months, and more than 100,000 civilians in the area fled in anticipation of the military mission. A Pakistani army officer warned that up to 200,000 people still in the region could also flee.
On Monday, US Central Command chief David Patraeus, who is in charge of the American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, met with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and army chief Ashfaq Pervez Kayani in Islamabad to discuss the offensive. French news agency AFP reported Patraeus said the United States "acknowledges the sacrifices of Pakistan in the war on terror."
A Wave of Suicide Attacks
The offensive follows a series of bloody attacks that have left at least 175 dead. The Pakistani Islamists' latest campaign of terror began on Oct. 5, with an attack on the offices of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in a well-secured part of Islamabad. A man in a uniform asked guards whether he could use the toilet, and they let him into the building. Once inside, he ignited his explosive vest, killing himself and five WFP employees.
Four days later, 53 people died in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, when a suicide bomber blew himself up in his car in a crowded marketplace.
On Oct. 10, assailants wearing military uniforms and traveling in a bus with a military license plate attacked the Pakistani army headquarters in Rawalpini. They overpowered guards at the first entrance, shot several soldiers at a second checkpoint and then launched a 22-hour hostage crisis. A special army unit finally managed to kill the hostage-takers. One of them, wearing an explosive vest, had forced 22 hostages to sit on the ground in a circle surrounding him. Only the group's leader was captured alive.
Last Monday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the northwestern city of Alpurai, and on Thursday terrorists stormed three police stations in Lahore, a major metropolis in eastern Pakistan and the country's cultural capital. Three female terrorists in uniform, carrying valid military identification cards, appeared in front of a school where elite units, including women, are trained. On the same day, a car bomb exploded in the northwest Pakistani city of Kohat and another bomb exploded in Peshawar.
The Taliban currently have their sights set on Peshawar, a city on the eastern end of the Khyber Pass and the birthplace of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist organization. Twelve people died there on Friday when a bomb was detonated in front of a police station. Authorities could only find one of the legs of the suicide bomber. They were unable to determine whether the bomber had been a man or a woman.The terrorist campaign has triggered renewed concern in the West over the stability of Pakistan, a nuclear power. It has left many asking whether the army is still capable of repelling an offensive by the Islamists, as it did about four months ago in the Swat Valley. Much to the distress of residents of the nearby capital, the Islamists had gained control of the region, which was once a popular tourist destination for people from Islamabad.
Those fears have now returned to Islamabad.
The unprecedented series of attacks has been in response to the Pakistani army's announcement that it planned to attack the epicenter of terror, South Waziristan, "to wipe out the terrorist elements there."
The Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-e-Taliban, an alliance of local extremists, has its headquarters in South Waziristan, and al-Qaida is also firmly entrenched there. Authorities estimate that there are up to 10,000 fighters in the border region, which is not under government control. The extremist groups there are loosely aligned. "We have no other option but to carry out an operation in South Waziristan," General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the Pakistani Army, who mobilized troops for the offensive, said last week.
In a video message from the Pakistani Taliban leadership, broadcast by al-Qaida last Wednesday, the group's commanders, Hakimullah Mehsud and Wali-ur-Rehman, declared that their true objective was to help their Afghan brothers fight the occupation by Western forces. But because Pakistan has aligned itself with the United States, they added, they are now fighting the government of their own country to weaken this alliance.
The terrorists can now rely on a nationwide network of allies, including jihadist groups from the Pakistani heartland that the country's intelligence service once supported in the struggle over India's crisis-torn Kashmir region. They now operate in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province, the most populous part of the country and, unlike the Taliban and al-Qaida, are accepted by many Pakistanis.
Pakistanis see groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi as allies in the fight against India, the United States and Shiite Muslims (even religious fraternal strife plays a role among the extremists), whose mosques have been the repeated target of attacks.
Pushing Pakistan to Go on the Offensive
Islamabad's allies, particularly the United States, have long urged the Pakistanis to attack the extremists in South Waziristan, a region where the Taliban also recruits fighters from neighboring Afghanistan. Just last month the US ambassador in Islamabad, Anne W. Patterson, said that Pakistan apparently had "other priorities" in fighting the Islamists in the border region. In an interview, Patterson said critically that the government "hesitates to intervene."
There is a reason for this hesitation, as is now becoming apparent: The army and the civilian administration are deeply divided over the offensive in the Taliban stronghold.
Speaking to a small group of journalists, army chief Kayani made no secret of his frustration over the political leadership. "The country is in one of its most difficult crises and Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani travels to China, while President Asif Ali Zardari disappears completely." The army leadership believes that the government is not making it sufficiently clear to the people that this war is also Pakistan's war, and that it is a war that must be waged, even in South Waziristan.
The Pakistani military has been at odds with President Zardari from the beginning. A former DJ and playboy, Zardari owes his political career to his murdered wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Most of the military's senior officers consider the president to be completely unqualified, and it galls them to have to take orders from him.
For this reason, there are persistent rumors in political circles in the capital that the army will force Zardari out of office next year. But this will only succeed if the president does not dismiss powerful army chief Kayani first and replace him with a loyal general.
New Problems for US-Pakistan Relations
Kayani has another problem. He is in the process of thoroughly ruining relations with Washington. The administration of President Barack Obama is willing to grant the troubled country $1.5 billion in annual economic aid --- on top of the existing $1 billion in military aid -- but only if it satisfies certain conditions.
The US's insistence that aid money be tied to stipulations designed to prevent the money from falling into the wrong hands has incensed Kayani, who sees the demand as evidence of Washington's one-sided support for the civilian government. During a visit to Kabul early last month, Kayani made it clear to the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, that he perceived Washington's criteria as an insult to his army.
Kayani has made his thoughts known to the public through many off-the-record conversations with the media, and in doing so has stirred up popular resentment against the United States and what are perceived as its unreasonable demands. It is quite possible that Pakistan is already the world's most anti-American country. From university professors to taxi drivers, most Pakistanis are convinced that the terrorism in their country is not homegrown, but a consequence of the US invasion in Afghanistan.
Kayani, who hardly disagrees, has urged the government to send Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi to Washington to protest against the US stipulations. Before Obama signed the aid agreement last week, the US Congress quickly adopted a supplementary protocol, under which both countries agree to respect each other's sovereignty.
On Monday, the co-author of the stipulations bill, John Kerry, met with Kayani and Gilani in an effort to assuage concerns about the conditions.
The government and its allies in Washington are extremely nervous about the many serious attacks throughout Pakistan. No one fully trusts anyone anymore, and everyone believes that anything could happen.
Much depends on the Pakistani army now. Senior officers, like former army Chief of Staff Mirza Aslam Beg, fear that the terrorists' next move could be an attack on one of the military facilities where Pakistan stores its nuclear bombs. Until now, military leaders have said, with utter conviction, that the terrorists could not gain control over a nuclear weapon, because the security system is too complex and sophisticated.
Nevertheless, no one today one can rule out the possibility that the terrorists could at least overcome the first security barriers.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,655967-2,00.html
10/19/2009
An Offensive Against the Taliban
Under Pressure, Pakistani Army Pushes into South Waziristan
By SPIEGEL Staff
An unprecedented wave of suicide bombings in recent weeks underscored the strength of the Islamic extremists entrenched in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Over the weekend, the Pakistani army fought back with a long awaited ground and air offensive.
Nothing works anymore in Islamabad. Normally the Pakistani capital, with its broad streets intersecting at right angles, is not one of Asia's typically gridlocked big cities. But now it takes hours to traverse. Terrorism is to blame.
Everyone is determined to prevent the next attack. A policeman on a motorcycle passes a white pickup truck and motions to the driver to pull over to the left side of the street. "I want to take a look at your truck bed," he says. The driver, a young man, jumps out, walks to the back of the truck and pulls back the plastic tarp covering the bed. "It's just soil, for my father's garden," he says. The police officer examines the load for a moment before indicating that the driver can continue on his way.
Other security forces have been stopping other vehicles at the same time. Some are forced to park in the middle of the street because there is no room on the shoulder. Within a few minutes, traffic is backed up by several hundred meters.
Of course, the residents of the capital of a high-risk country like Pakistan are used to security checks. In most cases, however, police have only set up roadblocks on major streets in the downtown area.
But now there is scrutiny at every corner, and it is being performed by all security forces. The police, military and paramilitary groups have occupied a city brimming with rumors. There is even talk that the terrorists are planning an attack on the parliament. With attacks occurring on a daily basis, such rumors no longer seem implausible.
Late last week, security had also been tightened at the airport. The only reason passengers were still being processed relatively smoothly was that travelers were now arriving at the airport several hours before their scheduled departures. Only one destination was shown in red on the arrivals and departures screen: Dera Ismail Khan. All flights in and out of the city in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, near the Waziristan region, had been cancelled. It was clear something was about to happen.
Army Launches Long-Anticipated Offensive
On Saturday, the Pakistani army moved into the region to begin a long-anticipated offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan. The Pakistani army's offensive is aimed at eliminating Pakistani Taliban militants tied to the Mehsud tribe. The tribe controls about half of the region. The United States had been pressuring Pakistan to crack down on extremists, who have used the area as a base for attacks against Western troops in neighboring Afghanistan. The Mehsud tribe are blamed for as much as 80 percent of the suicide attacks that have taken place in Pakistan over the last three years, including a number of attacks in recent weeks.
The army has said the operation -- which is comprised of large numbers of ground troops and air support from F-16 fighter jets and helicopter gun ships-- could last for two months. More than 28,000 soldiers are involved in the operation, and they are pitted against as many as 10,000 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. During the first few days of fighting, Pakistani army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas said 78 insurgents had been killed as well as nine soldiers, although it is difficult to independently verify those figures.
The offensive has been in the planning for months, and more than 100,000 civilians in the area fled in anticipation of the military mission. A Pakistani army officer warned that up to 200,000 people still in the region could also flee.
On Monday, US Central Command chief David Patraeus, who is in charge of the American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, met with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and army chief Ashfaq Pervez Kayani in Islamabad to discuss the offensive. French news agency AFP reported Patraeus said the United States "acknowledges the sacrifices of Pakistan in the war on terror."
A Wave of Suicide Attacks
The offensive follows a series of bloody attacks that have left at least 175 dead. The Pakistani Islamists' latest campaign of terror began on Oct. 5, with an attack on the offices of the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) in a well-secured part of Islamabad. A man in a uniform asked guards whether he could use the toilet, and they let him into the building. Once inside, he ignited his explosive vest, killing himself and five WFP employees.
Four days later, 53 people died in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, when a suicide bomber blew himself up in his car in a crowded marketplace.
On Oct. 10, assailants wearing military uniforms and traveling in a bus with a military license plate attacked the Pakistani army headquarters in Rawalpini. They overpowered guards at the first entrance, shot several soldiers at a second checkpoint and then launched a 22-hour hostage crisis. A special army unit finally managed to kill the hostage-takers. One of them, wearing an explosive vest, had forced 22 hostages to sit on the ground in a circle surrounding him. Only the group's leader was captured alive.
Last Monday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the northwestern city of Alpurai, and on Thursday terrorists stormed three police stations in Lahore, a major metropolis in eastern Pakistan and the country's cultural capital. Three female terrorists in uniform, carrying valid military identification cards, appeared in front of a school where elite units, including women, are trained. On the same day, a car bomb exploded in the northwest Pakistani city of Kohat and another bomb exploded in Peshawar.
The Taliban currently have their sights set on Peshawar, a city on the eastern end of the Khyber Pass and the birthplace of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist organization. Twelve people died there on Friday when a bomb was detonated in front of a police station. Authorities could only find one of the legs of the suicide bomber. They were unable to determine whether the bomber had been a man or a woman.The terrorist campaign has triggered renewed concern in the West over the stability of Pakistan, a nuclear power. It has left many asking whether the army is still capable of repelling an offensive by the Islamists, as it did about four months ago in the Swat Valley. Much to the distress of residents of the nearby capital, the Islamists had gained control of the region, which was once a popular tourist destination for people from Islamabad.
Those fears have now returned to Islamabad.
The unprecedented series of attacks has been in response to the Pakistani army's announcement that it planned to attack the epicenter of terror, South Waziristan, "to wipe out the terrorist elements there."
The Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-e-Taliban, an alliance of local extremists, has its headquarters in South Waziristan, and al-Qaida is also firmly entrenched there. Authorities estimate that there are up to 10,000 fighters in the border region, which is not under government control. The extremist groups there are loosely aligned. "We have no other option but to carry out an operation in South Waziristan," General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the Pakistani Army, who mobilized troops for the offensive, said last week.
In a video message from the Pakistani Taliban leadership, broadcast by al-Qaida last Wednesday, the group's commanders, Hakimullah Mehsud and Wali-ur-Rehman, declared that their true objective was to help their Afghan brothers fight the occupation by Western forces. But because Pakistan has aligned itself with the United States, they added, they are now fighting the government of their own country to weaken this alliance.
The terrorists can now rely on a nationwide network of allies, including jihadist groups from the Pakistani heartland that the country's intelligence service once supported in the struggle over India's crisis-torn Kashmir region. They now operate in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province, the most populous part of the country and, unlike the Taliban and al-Qaida, are accepted by many Pakistanis.
Pakistanis see groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi as allies in the fight against India, the United States and Shiite Muslims (even religious fraternal strife plays a role among the extremists), whose mosques have been the repeated target of attacks.
Pushing Pakistan to Go on the Offensive
Islamabad's allies, particularly the United States, have long urged the Pakistanis to attack the extremists in South Waziristan, a region where the Taliban also recruits fighters from neighboring Afghanistan. Just last month the US ambassador in Islamabad, Anne W. Patterson, said that Pakistan apparently had "other priorities" in fighting the Islamists in the border region. In an interview, Patterson said critically that the government "hesitates to intervene."
There is a reason for this hesitation, as is now becoming apparent: The army and the civilian administration are deeply divided over the offensive in the Taliban stronghold.
Speaking to a small group of journalists, army chief Kayani made no secret of his frustration over the political leadership. "The country is in one of its most difficult crises and Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani travels to China, while President Asif Ali Zardari disappears completely." The army leadership believes that the government is not making it sufficiently clear to the people that this war is also Pakistan's war, and that it is a war that must be waged, even in South Waziristan.
The Pakistani military has been at odds with President Zardari from the beginning. A former DJ and playboy, Zardari owes his political career to his murdered wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Most of the military's senior officers consider the president to be completely unqualified, and it galls them to have to take orders from him.
For this reason, there are persistent rumors in political circles in the capital that the army will force Zardari out of office next year. But this will only succeed if the president does not dismiss powerful army chief Kayani first and replace him with a loyal general.
New Problems for US-Pakistan Relations
Kayani has another problem. He is in the process of thoroughly ruining relations with Washington. The administration of President Barack Obama is willing to grant the troubled country $1.5 billion in annual economic aid --- on top of the existing $1 billion in military aid -- but only if it satisfies certain conditions.
The US's insistence that aid money be tied to stipulations designed to prevent the money from falling into the wrong hands has incensed Kayani, who sees the demand as evidence of Washington's one-sided support for the civilian government. During a visit to Kabul early last month, Kayani made it clear to the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, that he perceived Washington's criteria as an insult to his army.
Kayani has made his thoughts known to the public through many off-the-record conversations with the media, and in doing so has stirred up popular resentment against the United States and what are perceived as its unreasonable demands. It is quite possible that Pakistan is already the world's most anti-American country. From university professors to taxi drivers, most Pakistanis are convinced that the terrorism in their country is not homegrown, but a consequence of the US invasion in Afghanistan.
Kayani, who hardly disagrees, has urged the government to send Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi to Washington to protest against the US stipulations. Before Obama signed the aid agreement last week, the US Congress quickly adopted a supplementary protocol, under which both countries agree to respect each other's sovereignty.
On Monday, the co-author of the stipulations bill, John Kerry, met with Kayani and Gilani in an effort to assuage concerns about the conditions.
The government and its allies in Washington are extremely nervous about the many serious attacks throughout Pakistan. No one fully trusts anyone anymore, and everyone believes that anything could happen.
Much depends on the Pakistani army now. Senior officers, like former army Chief of Staff Mirza Aslam Beg, fear that the terrorists' next move could be an attack on one of the military facilities where Pakistan stores its nuclear bombs. Until now, military leaders have said, with utter conviction, that the terrorists could not gain control over a nuclear weapon, because the security system is too complex and sophisticated.
Nevertheless, no one today one can rule out the possibility that the terrorists could at least overcome the first security barriers.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,655967-2,00.html