03 October 2008

Now the Pakis don't like it

The International Herald Tribune has an article by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah:
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.
An estimated 250,000 people have now fled the gunship helicopters, jets, artillery, and mortar fire of the Pakistani Army, and the assaults, intimidation, and rough justice of the Taliban who have dug into Pakistan's tribal areas.
About 20,000 people are so desperate that they have flooded over the border from the Bajaur tribal area to seek safety in war-torn Afghanistan. Many others are crowding around this northwest Pakistani city, where staff members from the UN refugee agency are present at nearly a dozen camps.
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 Red Cross.
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 has increasingly taken action into its own hands with drone strikes and even a raid by 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 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad last month, which have generated high anxiety among the political, business and diplomatic elite and a feeling that the country is teetering.
In early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border.
The military was already 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 Wajid Ali Khan, a minister in the provincial government who has taken refuge in Peshawar.
Rico says if you're fleeing into Afghanistan, it's gotta be bad...

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