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Operation Tirah Valley | News & Updates

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Apparently it seems like one of the serving officers at Tirah is son of a serving General.
 
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Tirah Valley Operation

•On Thursday, security forces killed at least 15 more militants in a battle in the Tirah valley, between Khyber and Orakzai agencies. Thursday’s battle, which resulted in one soldier’s death, was the latest in a week-long operation against the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Islam (LI) fighters that took over the valley and are using it to conduct strikes against Peshawar and the surrounding areas.[2]

•On Wednesday, security forces and militants clashed after security forces rained artillery shells on their position in a battle that killed nine militants and injured two soldiers in the Daburai area of Upper Orakzai.[3]

Pakistan Army Rebuilding South Waziristan

•On Wednesday, the Washington Post released an article explaining some of the Pakistan Army’s efforts to support and win over the civilian population in war-torn South Waziristan. The article explains how the army provides agricultural support, builds and paves new roads, and has opened vocational schools in an effort to provide people alternatives to joining the Taliban. The article further discusses the impact of military rules governing the area, such as a ban on carrying weapons and tightly controlled access to the region, which foster reportedly animosity against the army.[4]

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Apparently it seems like one of the serving officers at Tirah is son of a serving General.

is that good or bad then?
 
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Why are our soldiers dying in Tirah?

Mosharraf Zaidi ... The writer is an analyst and commentator.
Friday, April 12, 2013


Why are Pakistani soldiers dying in Tirah? At what point does this question become one that Pakistan takes seriously?



Ever since violence became a visible and defining part of life for Pakistanis, particularly those that live in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Fata, the tendency has been for us to answer questions in rhetorical ways that divide us and fail to deliver solutions.



One camp is a small, but vocal minority. In it, a range of thinkers, academics and commentators have adapted the George W Bush approach to conflict resolution. This approach is not without merit. Many of its advocates have seen Pakistan asphyxiated by decades of social engineering, and they’ve watched the corrosion of a pluralist culture in this society. The constant stream of terrorist bombs, bullets and shrapnel that kills innocent people in Pakistan has exacerbated and heightened the sense of insecurity and alarm in this category of Pakistanis.



The violent conflict since 2001 has hastened these Pakistanis’ definition of themselves and others in binary terms: you’re either with us, or against us. You’re either with innocent people, or you’re with the nexus of Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda inspired groups like the TTP and its sundry affiliates across the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.



The other is a much larger demographic. It is the dominant social and political strain in the country and it is averse to clear and linear thinking about terrorist violence. It represents a remarkably inert philosophical approach to terror, because at its core, it argues that all the problems of national security and terrorism that Pakistan faces today are external to Pakistani society – and their epicentre is the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.



This approach is also not entirely without merit. The inertia in this argument is really central to understanding this strain in the Pakistani imagination. Simply put, no matter how many Pakistanis are killed by terrorists and how far and wide this violence extends, the national discourse responds with inaction and indifference because of the externalisation of the source of these problems.



The demands of a 24-7 news media culture, and the intense competition at play between various Pakistani institutions, business groups, political organisations and powerful individuals means that there is a constant attempt to simplify and synthesise complex phenomena.



Rather than helping to resolve differences, this oversimplification ends up creating more space for each of the two major strains of thinking to dig in their heels further and refuse to engage, with the possibility of the other having a valid point.



Our national discourse consistently conflates three separate (but often overlapping or interlinked) phenomena as one – extremism, insurgency, and terrorism. We need to recognise both the distinctions and the overlaps in them to have any chance to parsing the macro-level narratives that make arriving at political solutions nearly impossible.



In the broadest terms, extremism has the broadest reach, because it is a way of thinking, insurgency or militancy are more geographically specific, because they represent campaigns to win political power in a given area, and terrorism is extremely specific to each act of terror, yet terror is designed to support the domination of specific political ideas over others.



If we try to approach all three of these problems with the same approach, we will invariably fail. Often, we speak about the absence of a clearly articulated counterterrorism strategy in Pakistan. But the problem is much more severe. We have no plan, no strategy and no policy for either extremism, or insurgency, or terrorism – and we have no sense of the accentuation of these problems by other phenomena, like ‘ordinary’ crime.



Pakistan does not have an organically developed counter-insurgency manual – with much of our tactics and strategy having been derived from the failed clear-hold-build ideas used by the British and the Americans in Afghanistan. This is why we have campaign after campaign after campaign in Fata.



The Tirah Valley fight is not new. It is the same fight that began in 2001 when the first tribesmen were convinced by Arab, Chechen and Uzbek ‘fighters’ to join them in a war against ‘the imperial US’ and its ‘subservient Pakistan Army’. It keeps moving from one tribal agency to another, sometimes moving into Kunar, Khost and Nuristan, sometimes spilling into Chitral, Swat, Dir and Buner. But it is an insurgency.



Pakistan also does not have a counterterrorism strategy. This is a vital national failure because it basically allows four terrorist ‘departments’ to act unchallenged. The supply of people for acts of terror (terrorist human resources), the money for acts of terror (terror financing), the propaganda that stokes terrorist anger (terrorist marketing) and the weapons of terror, like bombs and bomb-making (terrorist IT) are all doing just fine because no national articulation of how to stop these things has been attempted.



Even a revision of anti-terror laws took Pakistan a decade to develop, though we knew as early as 2003 that this would eventually be a problem.



Finally, Pakistan has no counter-extremism policy or narrative. In fact, extremism is growing, in part, precisely because we’ve not invested in a national conversation about the challenges posed by all this violence. The more violence there is, the angrier the ‘with us or against us’ crowd becomes. The angrier they become, the more defensive and inward looking the dominant national strain of ‘its all because of America’ becomes.



This tension may not be tearing Pakistan apart, but in Tirah Valley, it is tearing the bodies of Pakistani SSG officers apart. That is not a matter of opinion. It is a fact of the battlefield. If our answer to this problem of insurgency is counter-extremism rhetoric, we have a problem. Unfortunately, the answer right now is not even rhetoric. It is silence. This represents a wholly different level of problem.



Worse yet, the most vital question about Tirah Valley gets lost in a heated and angry set of meaningless and empty rhetorical devices. Would either Khyber or Kurram agencies be as vulnerable to insurgent takeovers, terrorist safe havens, or extremist sermons (three separate but interlinked problems) as they are today, if they were governed the same way Chakwal, Jacobabad and Multan are? The answer is emphatically, no. They would not. Countless experts, both within and outside Pakistan have made appeals for the cessation of Fata’s ‘unique’ status over the years.



Fata is a cauldron of insurgency and a reservoir of Pakistani opacity because its people don’t have the same constitutional rights and protections that the system affords to all other Pakistanis. The Frontier Crimes Regulations are a national disgrace and the fighting in Tirah is the direct consequence of a consistent failure to address the constitutional and legal abnormality that is Fata’s status in the Pakistani state structure.



Major Mustafa Sabir and Captain Waseem ud Din Razi were killed in action in Tirah Valley last week – they are among at least three dozen valiant sons of Pakistan that have been killed in action. In Muslim tradition, we are taught not to mourn the shaheed. But we are also taught to value one human life as all humanity. Like the roughly 7,000 Pakistani soldiers and policemen that have died since 2001 in the conflict with Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda affiliated groups like the TTP, the martyrs of Tirah Valley remain unsung and dehumanised. At some point, Pakistan needs to ask itself the obvious question: Are we proud of the sacrifices our soldiers make to secure Pakistan, or are we ashamed?


One answer will assure us a deepening of what we’ve seen in Tirah Valley (insurgency), at PNS Mehran (terrorism) and ASWJ’s politics (extremism). The other will help us take the road to a self-confident, strong, assertive and free Pakistan. If you’re confused about which is which, spend a few minutes thinking about Major Mustafa Sabir and Captain Wasim ud Din Razi.



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Pakistan launches aerial assault to drive Taliban out from Tirah Valley


English.news.cn 2013-04-12
Xinhua

By Muhammad Tahir


ISLAMABAD, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Pakistani security forces are using fighter jets and gunship helicopters to flush out the Taliban fighters and other armed insurgents from a strategically located valley in the Khyber tribal region.

The aerial assault on Tirah Valley was launched last month after the Taliban took control of the area and expelled members of a pro-government armed group.

Fighters of another group, "Lashkar-e-Islam" or the Army of Islam,have been helping the Taliban in fighting the Pakistani forces.

The military said that at least 15 militants were killed in the assault on Tirah Valley Thursday morning. One soldier was killed on the Pakistani side, an Army statement said.

On Tuesday, the military said that several days of intense clashes left 23 Pakistani soldiers and more than 110 militants dead.

Tirah Valley, which is bordering Afghanistan, is very important for the Taliban because of its strategic location, having three entry points,one to the nearby Orakzai tribal region, the second to the northwestern Peshawar city, and third to the famous town Landi Kotal, which lies on the Khyber Pass, the main supply route for NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Although the Pakistan Army has no ground forces in Tirah Valley, their forces control the hilltops overlooking the rugged mountainous region from where they can monitor any movement of the Taliban militants and fighters of Lashkar-e-Islam.

Both groups routinely fire rockets into Hayat Abad, a posh area in the outskirts of Peshawar, located at the edge of the Khyber Pass.Twelve people were injured when the militants fired rockets into Hayat Abad on Tuesday evening.

Since there are no roads leading to the Tirah Valley, the Pakistani forces are now depending mainly on airpower to bomb the Taliban in efforts to clear the way for ground forces to advance into the region and eliminate the Taliban once and for all.

The military said that it will be using special commando units in driving the Taliban from the valley.

But the Taliban and armed militant groups are showing stiff resistance since they do not want to lose control of such a strategic position, the valley being its major hideout for their fighters who have fled from some areas after they were attacked by the Pakistani military.

Earlier, the Taliban expelled the fighters of the pro- government group "Ansar-ul-Islam," from the valley. The pro- government guerrillas retreated after suffering heavy casualties from the Taliban offensive.

The Pakistani military believes that total control of the Tirah Valley by the Taliban would destabilize the situation in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The Taliban presence in Tirah could also make the NATO supply route vulnerable at a time when the foreign forces in Afghanistan are packing up and the United States has already started withdrawing heavy equipment through Khyber's key route.

The Americans wanted Pakistani forces to take full control of the area to ensure the safety of the NATO trucks. The United States has in the past carried out drone strikes in Tirah Valley and killed important Taliban commanders and fighters.
 
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Apparently it seems like one of the serving officers at Tirah is son of a serving General.

I don't think we should discuss these matters here because they are soldiers (it doesn't matter s/o Maj. Col. or Gen.) and assigned to protect Pakistan, so no more or less. Being proud of is another issue.
 
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Apparently it seems like one of the serving officers at Tirah is son of a serving General.

comparison of such type is not healthy in my view. our soldiers deserve our respect independent of how we view our politicians. army should not be treated as a political party by comparing it with politicians but as an important national institution.
 
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What went wrong in case of lashkar e islam? Uptill now mangal bagh was calling himself man of pak army and he actually combated TTP...now they have joined hands with TTP and are combating pak army?
 
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I have read a few comments that have questioned the high number of casualties on our side. Please remember the following:

1 - PA has been in a war for the last 12 years therefore there is no terrain new and there is no lack of planning.
2 - Taliban is a formidable enemy.
3 - We are not US army that drops all sorts of bombs on it's enemy without thinking about the loss of civilian lives.
4 - PA officers lead from the front.

If you combine all the points above then it is easy to understand that this was the best plan and as true soldiers they knew that they are walking into the valley of death.

May Allah accept their shahadats, may Allah bless them with highest place in jannat, may Allah save Pakistan from this menace and may Allah bless us with a decisive victory over our enemies, internal and external, ameen.
 
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Army accepts failures when they come but indeed the enemy we are fighting are very well armed and extremely motivated

both sides share 1 thing in common - they're trained to fight and simply not afraid of death

Army has and will always have the upper hand but there will be costs.....this is not an easy war, and it wont have a quick or easy solution.

Learn the areas where they are fighting; it isn't urban warfare but guerilla warfare in complex terrain. This applies especially to N/S Waziristan & Orakzai/Hangu
 
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