Pakistanis Mired in Brutal Battle to Oust Taliban

LOE SAM, Pakistan — When Pakistan’s army retook this strategic stronghold from the Taliban last month, it discovered how deeply Islamic militants had encroached on — and literally dug into — Pakistani territory.

Behind mud-walled family compounds in the Bajaur area, a vital corridor to Afghanistan through Pakistan’s tribal belt, Taliban insurgents created a network of tunnels to store arms and move about undetected.

Some tunnels stretched for more than half a mile and were equipped with ventilation systems so that fighters could withstand a long siege. In some places, it took barrages of 500-pound bombs to break the tunnels apart.

“These were not for ordinary battle,” said Gen. Tariq Khan, the commander of the Pakistan Frontier Corps, who led the army’s campaign against the Taliban in the area.

After three months of sometimes fierce fighting, the Pakistani Army controls a small slice of Bajaur. But what was initially portrayed as a paramilitary action to restore order in the area has become the most sustained military campaign by the Pakistani Army against the Taliban and its backers in Al Qaeda since Pakistan allied itself with the United States in 2001.

President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to make the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan a top priority. The Bajaur campaign serves as a cautionary tale of the formidable challenge that even a full-scale military effort faces in flushing the Taliban and Al Qaeda from rugged northern Pakistan.

Pakistani officials describe the area as the keystone of an arc of militancy that stretches across the semiautonomous tribal region of Pakistan and into Afghanistan.

Under heavy pressure from the United States, Pakistani officials are vowing to dislodge the Taliban fighters and their Qaeda allies who have taken refuge in the tribal areas.

But a two-day visit to Loe Sam and Khar, the capital of Bajaur, arranged for foreign journalists by the Pakistani military, suggested that Pakistan had underestimated a battle-hardened opponent fighting tenaciously to protect its mountainous stronghold.

Taliban militants remain entrenched in many areas. Even along the road to Loe Sam, which the army laboriously cleared, sniper fire from militants continues.

The Pakistanis have also resorted to scorched-earth tactics to push the Taliban out, an approach that risks pushing more of their own citizens into the Taliban’s embrace.

After the Frontier Corps failed to dislodge the Taliban from Loe Sam in early August, the army sent in 2,400 troops in early September to take on a Taliban force that has drawn militants from across the tribal region, as well as a flow of fighters from Afghanistan.

Like all Pakistani soldiers, the troops sent here had been trained and indoctrinated to fight in conventional warfare against India, considered the nation’s permanent enemy, but had barely been trained in counterinsurgency strategy and tactics.

[More]

We gain one, we lose one.

There's a lot to talk about today, so I'm going to depart from my usual format.

According to Al Jazeera:

In a second battle in Helmand province, Afghan and international troops retook the Nad Ali district centre - which had been held by fighters - during a three-day fight, Ahmadi said.

That battle, which also involved airstrikes, ended on Saturday and resulted in the death of 40 Taliban fighters, officials said.

Afghan police and soldiers were now in control of the district centre.

Nato said its aircraft bombed fighters after they were seen gathering for a major attack, killing "multiple enemy forces".

"If the fighters planned a spectacular attack prior to the winter, this was a spectacular failure," Richard Blanchette, an Isaf spokesman, said.

Although I was somewhat disappointed to learn that there had been a district that I had not known was held by the Taliban, this is of course good news, as is the news, also reported in the article, that NATO had repulsed a major attack on Lashkar Gah. However, AJ did not mention this somewhat less cheerful development, which I found out about via Quqnoos:

Taliban claim to have forced NATO-led troops from a remote district

THE NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has withdrawn from a district in the north-eastern province of Nuristan, the international force said.

ISAF said it retreated from its forward operating base in the Kamdish district on Friday following advice from Afghanistan’s Defence Ministry.

But the Taliban claimed that it forced ISAF troops in the district to retreat after engaging them in fierce fighting in the district, one of the country’s most insecure.

The situation in Nuristan has been growing increasingly worrying. According to my current map prototype, the Taliban currently controls three of its eight districts, as well as the Dara-ye Pech District just across the border in Kunar Province, and a fourth district, Bargomatal, was attacked by Tehrik-i-Taliban-i-Pakistan back in July. I still have been unable to determine the outcome of that battle, but am inclined to think that, even if the TTP did manage to take it, which I don't think they did, their forces have since been withdrawn to fight the Pakistani security forces in Bajaur, which would leave the district only nominally in the Taliban's hands, just as so much of the rest of the province is only nominally in the hands of NATO and the central government. I have seen reports that some of the forces currently fighting in Bajaur had previously been fighting in Afghanistan, which lends some credence to this theory.

Nuristan, for those of you who are not familiar with it (i.e. pretty much all of you), is one of the most isolated inhabited regions on the face of the Earth. Its terrain is nearly impassable, and it is so out of the way that Islam didn't reach it until the end of the 19th century. Before then it was known as Kafiristan (land of the unbelievers) and its inhabitants as the Red Kafirs; their cousins, the Black Kafirs, or Kalasha, live on the Pakistani side of the Durand line and still practice their age-old pagan religion. The Nuristanis speak languages that are unusual even for Mianistan; while most languages in the region are either Iranian (e.g. Pashto, Wakhi, Yidgha) or Indo-Aryan (e.g. Khowar, Kalasha, Torwali) (although this "Dardic" sub-group of the Indo-Aryan branch is pretty weird), the Nuristani languages form a group all of their own.

There is, however, yet another major development regarding Afghanistan in the news today. Quqnoos reports:

US wants to reduce dependence on government by arming militias

THE UNITED States plans to arm tribal militias against the Taliban, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said at a NATO summit in Hungary.

As part of a plan to create greater co-operation on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, the US wants to train tribal militias in an attempt to reduce its dependence on the central government in Kabul.

Parliament members had already suggested arming the tribes, but the idea was not given any currency at the time.

This is a superb idea. Working with the tribes worked in Iraq, is working in Pakistan, and, unlike McCain's bizarre idea to "clear and hold" some of the most impassible terrain on Earth, it would also work in Afghanistan. In case you haven't noticed, I am strongly pro-tribe, not only because of my own tribal identity (Stewart of Bote FTW!), but also simply because it works. Indeed, in regions such as Mianistan I would venture to say that it is the only strategy that will work. My friend Woke at News Hounds has often said that it is impossible for a conventional army to defeat a popular insurgency. Although it is possible to do it if you brutally punish the civilian population, as Genghis Khan did, that's not really an option if you're the good guys, so it's true so far as we are concerned. This means that if you are faced with an insurgency, the only way that you can win is if it stops being popular. The psychopathic, woman-oppressing, elder-beheading Taliban are already helping us out on this one. However, their antisocial ways can be counteracted by the collateral damage we often inflict when we fight them directly. This means that there needs to be a popular insurgency against the unpopular one. We can then support the locals rather than killing them. And in the tribal reality of Mianistan, supporting the locals means supporting the tribes.

Blast hits Pakistan tribal meeting

An explosion at a meeting of tribal elders in northwest Pakistan has killed at least 20 people and wounded 70 others, an official said.

The suspected suicide bombing happened on Friday in the Orakzai district, one of Pakistan's seven semi-autonomous tribal regions, security officials said.

"We were busy in raising a lashkar [a tribal militia] to evict Taliban from the region when this attack took place," Qeemat Khan Orakzai, a member of the council, told the Reuters news agency.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

The members of the Alizai tribe had met in the town of Ghaljo in mountainous Orakzai, which is the only one of the tribal regions that does not border Afghanistan.

'Hideouts' destroyed

A security official said that the attack came a day after tribesmen had targeted two hideouts belonging to pro-Taliban groups operating in the area.

"The tribesmen blew up two hideouts of the militants a day earlier and it is possible this attack was in revenge for their actions," a security official told the AFP news agency on condition of anonymity.

The bombing came a day after four tribal elders in Bajaur, a tribal region north of Orakzai, were abducted and beheaded after attending another pro-government meeting, officials said.

"People will tell you that Pakistan is already in a state of war. Every day there are suicide bombings," Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from the North West Frontier province, said.

"The violence is escalating at a time that the national assembly is not able to come to grips with the situation.

"The death toll could rise further," he said.

Violence has intensified across Pakistan in recent months since the army began an offensive against the pro-Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in the Bajaur and Swat regions.

Orakzai, near the main northwest city of Peshawar, has been relatively peaceful compared to the other tribal regions.

Via Al Jazeera.


Comment:

The stupidity of the Taliban is breathtaking. I am at a loss as to how a Californian suburbanite has a better understanding of tribal politics than a group that's based in a heavily tribal region. When the tribes told the Taliban that they should leave because of the effect that their war with the Pakistani security forces was having on civilians, they should have done so. They should have pulled back to Waziristan, where the Pakistani government still has little inclination to fight them. Then, once the security forces had been withdrawn, they should have begun re-infiltrating the northern districts and agencies. That was their only real option, because the tribes are the reality, and you cannot declare war on reality and win.

Of course, the Taliban should never have let it come to this in the first place. From the very beginning, they should have been trying to bring tribal elders over to their side— through bribery, conversion, or what have you. They should have jockeyed for power within the tribes, perhaps poisoning the odd rival, or having a rival group take him out. When they did take such action towards an elder, it should never have been direct; proxies, or even false flags, should always have been used. They should have formed alliances, exploited old feuds, and arranged strategic marriages to solidify these networks of support. This would have established themselves as a major, if not the major, political power. This was the logical, reasonable thing to do. It's what the Prophet Muḥammad did. If they had done it, the security forces would have been the ones to receive the ultimatum, not them.

But they did not do it, and they did receive the ultimatum, and they are responding to it in the worst conceivable way. Beheading elders? This sends a very clear message, not only to the tribesmen of the elders in question, but also to all of the other tribesmen. If I were a Waziri elder, I would be getting very nervous right about now.

Pakistan tribes attack Taliban

Tribal volunteers in Pakistan have threatened to destroy the house of Maulvi Omar, a senior Pakistani Taliban spokesman, in the north of the country.

The volunteers surrounded Omar's house on Monday and also said that the homes of other Taliban supporters would be targeted.

The threats are part of a crackdown on the Taliban some tribes people are launching in the Bajaur Agency.

The volunteers' commander says they have 20,000 men ready to carry out the campaign and that they are not asking for any government help.

Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said that a military operation in Bajaur had made it the scene of heavy fighting and displaced tens of thousands of people from the area.

"[This] caused considerable anger at both the, so called, Taliban in the region for destabilising the region, and the military coming.

"That disillusionment now seems to have turned against the fighters who have been fighting the military."

Hyder said that the locals have been burning the houses of senior commanders who have allied themselves to the Taliban and surrounded the house of Omar.

"There was some desperate attempts by the pro-Taliban elements to try and prevent the destruction of Maulvi Omar's house, but the tribals have said that they will go ahead anyway."

However, Hyder said that Afghan refugees and some Afghan commanders in the area were still attempting to resist the tribal volunteers.

Rocket attack

The attacks came a day after opposition fighters fired rockets at the home of a politician in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan.

Two rockets damaged three homes in the town of Marden on Sunday.

The rockets failed to hit the home of Amir Haider Khan Hoti, the North West Frontier Province's chief minister and the intended target.

No one was injured in the attack. Hoti was said to be in Peshwar, the provincial capital, at the time.

Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the provincial information minister, said: "We expect more such incidents."

"They are not going to be stopped here. We are facing a war-like situation."

The strike followed a number of attacks targeting politicians in the lawless border area.

A suicide bomber detonated a bomb outside the house of a leading pro-government politician last week, killing four people.

Via Al Jazeera.


Comment:

This is only one example of a number of tribal activities currently underway against the Taliban.

In other news, I have finally found highly detailed maps of the border region, which I am working on integrating into a single very high quality reference map.

Interview with Waziri soldier

Very, very interesting.

U.S., Pakistani troops exchange fire

WASHINGTON — U.S. and Pakistani ground forces exchanged fire across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border on Thursday, the latest in a string of incidents that has ratcheted up diplomatic tension between the two allies.

No casualties or injuries were reported after Pakistani forces shot at two U.S. helicopters from a Pakistani border post. U.S. and Pakistani officials clashed over whether the American helicopters had entered Pakistan.

The incident follows a U.S. campaign of attacks on militant targets inside Pakistan, including a September 3 U.S. commando raid on a village compound in South Waziristan. Islamabad has protested those strikes and warned it would defend itself.

"Just as we will not let Pakistan's territory be used by terrorists for attacks against our people and our neighbors, we cannot allow our territory and our sovereignty to be violated by our friends," Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said in New York on Thursday.

But in Washington, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman insisted the helicopters had not entered Pakistan. He described the incident as "troubling" and called on Islamabad for an explanation.

"The flight path of the helicopters at no point took them over Pakistan," he said. "The Pakistanis have to provide us with a better understanding of why this took place."

According to Pakistan's military, its soldiers fired warning shots at two U.S. helicopters after they intruded into Pakistani airspace. The U.S. military said the helicopters were protecting a patrol about one mile inside Afghanistan when Pakistani forces opened fire.

UNCERTAIN BORDER

"The (helicopters) did not return fire but the ground forces fired suppressive fire at that outpost. The Pakistani forces then returned that fire. The whole exchange lasted about five minutes," said an official with U.S. Central Command, which oversees American military operations in Afghanistan.

The U.S. forces were operating under NATO command.

Thursday's confrontation followed a dispute earlier this week over reports of a downed U.S. drone in Pakistan. Pakistani officials said a small unmanned American aircraft crashed in Pakistan, but U.S. officials denied it, saying a drone went down in Afghanistan and was recovered.

The rugged border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan is seen by Washington as critical to its fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The Bush administration considers Pakistan an ally in counterterrorism but U.S. officials say Islamabad has not done enough against militants there.

The uncertain border also complicates efforts, making it difficult for forces to determine when they are in Afghanistan or Pakistan, both U.S. and Pakistani officials concede.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, after meeting Zardari on Thursday, said she believed he was strongly committed to fighting militants.

"We talked about how we might assist Pakistan in doing what it needs to do, but I think there is a very strong commitment. And after all, it is the same enemy," she said in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

Via Comcast.

Comment:

The US military had better get to the bottom of this, or it risks completely alienating the tribes.

US, Pakistan, Afghanistan to create joint military force

WASHINGTON: The US is discussing with Pakistan and Afghanistan to create a joint military force to combat insurgents in the two south Asian nations, a senior US official confirmed Tuesday.

"We’re obviously taking a good look at it. We’re going to analyse it and see where we go from here," State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood said, adding that "We will probably have something to say once we’ve done a thorough analysis of it."

Last month, officials from the three countries began discussing the creation of a joint military force for anti-insurgency operations on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the Washington Post quoted Afghan Defence Minister Rahim Wardak as saying Tuesday.

"The terrorists have not recognised any boundaries. So to fight them, we have to eventually come up with some arrangement, together with our neighbour Pakistan," Wardak said.

"Pakistan’s government is considering the plan. They say they are looking at it," he added.

Via OINN.

Comment:

This is more like it. The recent unilateral attacks on Pakistan have been nothing short of catastrophic.