Sunday, October 05, 2008
PESHAWAR: War has come to Pakistan, not just as terrorist bombings, but as full-scale battles, leaving Pakistanis angry and dismayed as the dead, wounded and displaced turn up right on their doorstep, says New York Times.
An estimated 250,000 people have now fled the helicopters, jets, artillery and mortar fire of the Pakistan Army, and the assaults, intimidation and rough justice of the Taliban who have dug into the tribal areas.
About 20,000 people are so desperate that they have flooded over the border from Bajaur to seek safety in Afghanistan.
Many others are crowding around Peshawar, where staff members from the United Nations refugee agency are present at nearly a dozen camps.
No reliable casualty figures are available. But the International Committee of the Red Cross flew in a special surgical team from abroad last week to work alongside Pakistani doctors and help treat the wounded in two hospitals, so urgent has the need become.
"This is now a war zone," said Marco Succi, the spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Not since Pakistan forged an alliance with the United States after 9/11 has the Pakistani Army fought its own people on such a scale and at such close quarters to a major city. After years of relative passivity, the Army is now engaged in heavy fighting with the militants on at least three fronts.
The sudden engagement of the Pakistani Army comes after months in which the United States has heaped criticism, behind the scenes and in public, on Pakistan for not doing enough to take on the militants, and increasingly took action into its own hands with drone strikes and even a raid by the Special Operations forces in Pakistan's tribal areas.
But the Army campaign has also unfolded as the Taliban have encroached deeper into Pakistan proper and carried out far bolder terrorist attacks, like the Marriott Hotel bombing on Sept 20, which have generated fears among the political, business and diplomatic elite that the country is teetering.
Earlier this summer, the military became locked in an uphill fight against the militants in Swat, a more settled area of North-West Frontier Province that was once a middle-class ski resort. Today it is a maelstrom of killing.
"Swat is a place of hell," said NWFP Minister for Environment Wajid Ali Khan, who has taken refuge in Peshawar. Wajid Khan said he was so afraid that he had not been to his house in Swat for a month.
At a third front, south of Peshawar, around the town of Darra Adam Khel, the Army recently recaptured from Taliban control the strategic Kohat tunnel, a road more than a mile long that carries Nato supplies from the Karachi Port to the American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
But even as the gruesome effects of the battles slam the national consciousness, there has been scant effort to prepare the public for the impact of the fighting. Public opinion has soured on Pakistan's alliance with the United States and has strongly opposed military campaigns that inflict heavy civilian casualties.
Law enforcement officials and residents of Bajaur and Swat say there have been many civilian deaths, but so far, no agency or government body has offered an estimate of those killed.
Hanging in the balance in the fighting is the allegiance of the civilians who have seen their homes wrecked, their cattle and crops abandoned, and their loved ones killed and wounded.
Army commanders have said in order to put down the Taliban, the government must win the hearts and minds of the Bajaur tribesmen.
But in interviews in the camps, and in villages around Peshawar where the displaced are bunking with relatives, many of the people of Bajaur say they are fed up with both sides of the conflict.
In the Red Cross hospital ward, two young brothers, Haseenullah, 5, and Shakirullah, 8, lay immobile on their hospital beds, their limbs tightly bound in white bandages covering what Dr Daniel Brechbuhler, a Red Cross surgeon, said were shrapnel wounds.
The father of the two wounded boys, Hajji Sher Zaman, a relatively well-to-do used-car dealer in Bajaur, said he had no patience with the Taliban.
But Zaman said he was furious with the government for not holding anyone responsible for the killing and wounding of civilians.
"In Bajaur, innocent people are being killed as infidels, the dead cattle are lying on the road, the roads are tainted with the blood of the people who have been killed," he said. On return trips in recent weeks, he said, his village was "full of the rotten smell of dead animals".
"Why not target the real people, the administration knows where they are," Zaman said.
In another ward, Amin Baacha, 13, lay with only one arm, his right one had been amputated. An Army helicopter had circled his family's pick-up truck as they were fleeing their village and fired on them, the boy said.
The Taliban were well financed, some of the displaced tribesmen said.
In Koz Cinari, in Mohmand, the Taliban gathered nightly with a fleet of up to 100 double-cabin pick-up trucks, according to a resident of Koz Cinari who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The vehicles were carefully caked in mud for camouflage against possible sightings from government planes, with only a patch of clear glass in front for the driver. The convoys then crossed into Bajaur with men and weapons, the resident said.
Foreign languages pierced the night-time air as the vehicles were prepared, the resident said.
According to the military officials at the briefing on Monday, many of the Taliban fighters come from Central Asia.
The one hope in the gloom of war, said civilians and law enforcement officials, has been the formation of small private armies by tribal leaders, known in the region as Lashkar.
They have traditionally served as a way of dealing with squabbles in the tribal society, but are now being formed in some cases to stand up to the Taliban.
But whether the fervour of the tribesmen and their ancient equipment can be a match for the ideological zeal, modern weaponry and sophisticated tactics of the Taliban is an open question.
The police chief of North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, said he had encouraged the new police chief in Shabqadar to organise a 'popular movement'.
Last week, about 500 people, led by the local police chief, marched toward a fort controlled by the Taliban in Shabqadar, Khan said.
A 15-hour battle ensued, leaving nine Taliban fighters dead and 28 wounded, the police chief said. On the government side, one man was killed, and five wounded, he said.
In revenge, the Taliban threatened to blow up Warsak dam, the main water supply for Peshawar. But Khan said he was not deterred. He would not back down. "I told the governor: Open many fronts. We are more than them."
