Taliban, Pashtoons and Pakistan

#99 Posted by adamkhan
"The most important factor in that is the sincerity of the Pakitan army. In that recent incident where those 30 brave FC jawans held the sararogha fort for six hours in the face of an onslaught led by baitullah mehsud himself, no support was provided, to me this casts serious doubts on the sincerity of the GHQ in dealing with this menace. "

I apologize if I did not read your posts correctly.
The Pak army does not have the political capital to go in those areas on its own. All those that are fighting there are either former or the current army intelligence assets.

They way they are fighting in FATA is suspicious. The taliban attacks and the army response both have some strangeness to it.

To me it appears to be a set up for something bigger in that area. Watch out and pay close attention to the pattern emerging there!

#105 Posted by Zakkk on February 2, 2008 7:54:01 am


Re: # 103 Drug trade and smuggling thanks to US policies in afghanistan.


yeah....how dare the US attack the people who attacked the wtc and the people who shelter the attackers..

bad usa..bad bad...no donut..

Re: # 103 Drug trade and smuggling thanks to US policies in afghanistan.

..at the 'risk' of Talibanization..

So what? Talibanis are not Martians.

Re: # 102

so who is financing these people, talibaboons?... saudis?... you pakis better wake up and take action now, before it's too late...

Adamkhan: Very true, Aftab Sherpao has already admtted to that in his recent interview

Sherpao says policy on Taliban failing
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C01%5C28%5Cstory_28 -1-2008_pg1_7
* Claims NWFP at risk of total Talibanisation

By Khalid Hasan

LAHORE: Former interior minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao told the New York Times in an interview published on Sunday that the rapid rise of the Taliban is to be attributed to the failure to take “swift and decisive action� against them. Sherpao said, “The police are scared. They don’t want to get involved.� The Frontier Corps was “too stressed�, he added, and while the Pakistan Army has forces in the Tribal Areas where the militants have built their sanctuaries, the soldiers have remained in their headquarters.

Total Talibanisation: He warned that there is a risk of “total Talibanisation� of the NWFP.

He said the Taliban were well-financed, skilled at propaganda and paying political opponents to stay away from elections. “Unless you involve the political parties, civil society, [and] religious leaders, this is not going to make any headway.�

“We have taken note of various imaginary scenarios being propounded by those who do not wish Pakistan well. Such elements have never reconciled to a nuclear Pakistan,� he said, a probable reference to reports about the possibility of Pakistan’s “loose nukes� falling into extremist hands and the rumoured U.S. plans to secure the country’s nuclear assets.

He said Pakistan was capable of thwarting all threats to its sovereignty and nuclear capability, and asked the officers and men entrusted with these weapons to continue training in order to maintain professional excellence.

///////////

The above is from dawn of today and is a clear statement that the US forces will in afghanistan will be nuked if there is an attack on pakistan. Finally may be the time has come to get rid of the islamic bomb.

Woo hoo...pureland beat out iraq and afghanistan!!

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4. Haiti

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5. Pakistan

The country, which borders Afghanistan, suffers from ongoing geopolitical turmoil. Bomb attacks and rioting between Shia and Sunni Muslim communities are a threat. In December 2007, opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated during a suicide bombing after months of strife over delayed elections.

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HP sahib

In NO WAY would I ever support the taliban. This is the thing that I said in my earlier post, the beduin onslaught is mutating pukhtoon culture on a massive level. the norms are changing and the attitudes along with them. I was making the point that the pukhtoons are victims of this wave of wahabism... these suicide bombings and beheading in public are a direct result of that strategic move of replacing the nationalists with the fundamentalists, which was executed to perfection during the 80s. My first post was about some of the interactors here who reffered to the pashtoons as some subhuman beings incapable of rational decision making.

In my opinion, the short term solution for this problem is the same as for any insurgency, military means coupled with diplomacy. The most important factor in that is the sincerity of the Pakitan army. In that recent incident where those 30 brave FC jawans held the sararogha fort for six hours in the face of an onslaught led by baitullah mehsud himself, no support was provided, to me this casts serious doubts on the sincerity of the GHQ in dealing with this menace.

For the long term, we need to get rid of this "sensitivity" towards criticism of islam. As long as we put religion in the preamble of our constitution the parameters of debate within this country would be determined by the mullah. And we all know how efficient they are in gaining mileage from that.

US missile whacks jihadis a few miles away from a paki base and the jihadis respond by whacking paki army soldiers?

sounds like a win-win situation to me..

5 security men slain in N Waziristan suicide attack

* Local administration says blast killed 19, including 9 FC troops
* Roadside explosion injures two soldiers in South Waziristan

By Haji Mujtaba

MIRANSHAH: A suicide bomber rammed an explosives-laden car into a security checkpost in North Waziristan on Friday, killing six people, officials said.

The attack comes three days after a missile attack in Mir Ali town that killed top Al Qaeda commander Abu Laith Al-Libi.

“It was a suicide attack on a security checkpost in which three tribal policemen and two paramilitary soldiers [died],� military spokesman Maj Gen Athar Abbas told Daily Times. Eight others were injured, he added.

19 ‘dead’: Local administration sources said 19 people including nine Frontier Corps soldiers died in the attack. They said a number of tribal policemen (Khasadars) and civilians were also killed.

Yasser, dear boy, you have been touting the merits of the Cabinet Mission Plan that was rejected by Nehru and the Congress Party.

Guess what? The world has come full circle and is now proposing a Cabinet Mission Plan.... but this time for Pakistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/opinion/01harrison.html?_r=1& oref=slogin

Drawn and Quartered

By SELIG S. HARRISON
Published: February 1, 2008

WHATEVER the outcome of the Pakistani elections, now scheduled for Feb. 18, the existing multiethnic Pakistani state is not likely to survive for long unless it is radically restructured.

Given enough American pressure, a loosely united, confederated Pakistan could still be preserved by reinstating and liberalizing the defunct 1973 Constitution, which has been shelved by successive military rulers. But as matters stand, the Punjabi-dominated regime of Pervez Musharraf is headed for a bloody confrontation with the country’s Pashtun, Baluch and Sindhi minorities that could well lead to the breakup of Pakistan into three sovereign entities.

In that event, the Pashtuns, concentrated in the northwestern tribal areas, would join with their ethnic brethren across the Afghan border (some 40 million of them combined) to form an independent “Pashtunistan.� The Sindhis in the southeast, numbering 23 million, would unite with the six million Baluch tribesmen in the southwest to establish a federation along the Arabian Sea from India to Iran. “Pakistan� would then be a nuclear-armed Punjabi rump state.

In historical context, such a breakup would not be surprising. There had never been a national entity encompassing the areas now constituting Pakistan, an ethnic mélange thrown together hastily by the British for strategic reasons when they partitioned the subcontinent in 1947.

For those of Pashtun, Sindhi and Baluch ethnicity, independence from colonial rule created a bitter paradox. After resisting Punjabi domination for centuries, they found themselves subjected to Punjabi-dominated military regimes that have appropriated many of the natural resources in the minority provinces — particularly the natural gas deposits in the Baluch areas — and siphoned off much of the Indus River’s waters as they flow through the Punjab.

The resulting Punjabi-Pashtun animosity helps explain why the United States is failing to get effective Pakistani cooperation in fighting terrorists. The Pashtuns living along the Afghan border are happy to give sanctuary from Punjabi forces to the Taliban, which is composed primarily of fellow Pashtuns, and to its Qaeda friends.

Pashtun civilian casualties resulting from Pakistani and American air strikes on both sides of the border are breeding a potent underground Pashtun nationalist movement. Its initial objective is to unite all Pashtuns in Pakistan, now divided among political jurisdictions, into a unified province. In time, however, its leaders envisage full nationhood. After all, before the British came, the Pashtuns had been politically united under the banner of an Afghan empire that stretched eastward into the Punjabi heartland.

The Baluch people, for their part, have been waging intermittent insurgencies since their forced incorporation into Pakistan in 1947. In the current warfare Pakistani forces are widely reported to be deploying American-supplied aircraft and intelligence equipment that was intended for use in Afghan border areas. Their victims are forging military links with Sindhi nationalist groups that have been galvanized into action by the death of Benazir Bhutto, a Sindhi hero as was her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

The breakup of Pakistan would be a costly and destabilizing development that can still be avoided, but only if the United States and other foreign donors use their enormous aid leverage to convince Islamabad that it should not only put the 1973 Constitution back into effect, but amend it to go beyond the limited degree of autonomy it envisaged. Eventually, the minorities want a central government that would retain control only over defense, foreign affairs, international trade, communications and currency. It would no longer have the power to oust an elected provincial government, and would have to renegotiate royalties on resources with the provinces.

In the shorter term, the Bush administration should scrap plans to send Special Forces into border areas in pursuit of Al Qaeda, which would only strengthen Islamist links with Pashtun nationalists. It should help secular Pashtun forces to compete with the Islamists by pushing for fair representation of Pashtun areas now barred from political participation.

It is often argued that the United States must stand by Mr. Musharraf and a unitary Pakistani state to safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. But the nuclear safeguards depend on the Pakistani Army as an institution, not on the president. They would not be affected by a break-up, since the nuclear weapons would remain under the control of the Punjabi rump state and its army.

The Army has built up a far-flung empire of economic enterprises in all parts of Pakistan with assets in the tens of billions, and can best protect its interests by defusing the escalating conflict with the minorities. Similarly, the minorities would profit from cooperative economic relations with the Punjab, and for this reason prefer confederal autonomy to secession. All concerned, including the United States, have a profound stake in stopping the present slide to Balkanization.

Selig S. Harrison is the director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and the author of “In Afghanistan’s Shadow,� a study of Baluch nationalism.

I don't think we can simplify the issue by just focusing on the tribal aspect of Pashtuns. Moreover, I think as a community they all are going through an identity crisis.

Historically, they've always felt squeezed between two civilizations: Khorasan on one side(to which they were a part, but their language was not given official importance), and the Indus Civilization to the east.

Now some of them think they can--literally and figuartively-kill two birds with one stone: Salafism. Taliban push their ethnic agenda under the pretence that they are the real muslims, and not their two neighbors.

This situation is a royal mess. So many innocent persons will perish alongside the terrorists.

Re: # 93 pavo

Don't worry about my "sentiments"... I have none.. :)

Brits sure used divide and rule policy which did create polarization among communities... but that's not the whole story...

Re: # 93 pavo

Don't worry about my "sentiments"... I have none.. :)

Brits sure used divide and rule policy which did create polarization among communities... but that's not the whole story...

My Dear Sir , What I humbly meant was that Pakistan was created because of British policies adopted after 1858.My apologies if this assertion hurt your sentiments.

Re: # 90 pavo

Pakiland is NOT a british creation.. it's a muslim creation, muslims wanted it and they got it...

It's another matter they couldn't hack it, they didn't have the discipline, determination, vision and leadsersip to make a nation... let's not blame the brits :)