"Pakistanis hit back at Taliban; As police falter, civilians step in" by Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah, New York Times News Service | November 2, 2008
SHALBANDI, Pakistan - On a rainy Friday evening in early August, six Taliban fighters attacked a police post in a village in Buner, a quiet farming valley just outside Pakistan's lawless tribal region.
The militants tied up eight policemen and lay them on the floor, and according to local accounts, the youngest member of the gang, a 14-year-old, shot the captives on orders from his boss. The fighters stole uniforms and weapons and fled into the mountains.
I'm just not buying it, sorry!
Almost instantly, the people of Buner, armed with rifles, daggers, and pistols, formed a posse, and after five days they cornered and killed the militants. The stand at Buner has entered the lore of Pakistan's war against the militants as a dramatic example of ordinary citizens' determination to draw a line against the militants.
Who are the Taliban, anyway?
"Something of a catchall term for loosely affiliated insurgents without a singular command structure. Often, the Afghan government favors the phrase 'enemies of the state' (New York Times July 24, 2007)."
"The Taliban is growing and creating new alliances not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation," says Pakistani historian and political commentator Tariq Ali. "As the British and the Soviets discovered to their cost in the preceding two centuries, Afghans never like being occupied."
Also see: Afghanistan's Other Government
And today, readers?
"More and more, people here look back to the era of harsh Taliban rule from 1996 to 2001, describing it as a time of security and peace."
Oh, oh, oh!!!! I'm so offended by the New York Times and its bullshit!
Oh, one more thing:
"The U.S. government was well aware of the Taliban's reactionary program, yet it chose to back their rise to power in the mid-1990s. The creation of the Taliban was "actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA," according to Selig Harrison, an expert on U.S. relations with Asia. "The United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul," adds respected journalist Ahmed Rashid. When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw "nothing objectionable" in the Taliban's plans to impose strict Islamic law, and Senator Hank Brown, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East and South Asia, welcomed the new regime: "The good part of what has happened is that one of the factions at last seems capable of developing a new government in Afghanistan." "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis. There will be Aramco [the consortium of oil companies that controlled Saudi oil], pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that," said another U.S. diplomat in 1997."
Are we clear, readers?
But it says as much about the shortcomings of Pakistan's increasingly overwhelmed police forces and the pell-mell nature of the efforts to stop the militants, who week by week seem to seep deeper into Pakistan from their tribal strongholds.
Translation: the Pakistan government's and U.S.' campaign of mass-murder is failing. Ever notice you never hear about the supply lines?
Since the events in Buner, the inspector general of the police in the North-West Frontier province, Malik Naveed Khan, has encouraged citizens in other towns and villages in his realm to form posses of their own. The hope is that determination itself will deter Taliban encroachment, building on the August victory with one phalanx after another of committed citizens.
But the strategy is also a sign of his desperation. "We are laying down our lives," Khan said in an interview in October. "By the hundreds the police are being targeted and killed."
He has had to lower recruitment standards to fill out the ranks, he said, "because this is war." Even so, he has supplemented his force with what he said were some 15,000 "special police" - citizens whom he cannot pay, but whom he is willing to arm. "Any community which helps us, we give them weapons," Khan said.
The army was of no use here. "There is no other way," Khan said. "Pure military action would create a lot of devastation, to the extent that people would turn against the government."
They ALREADY HAVE!
Indeed, after the Taliban were cornered, a new peace committee composed of elders and politicians passed a resolution declaring Buner a zone free of both the army and the Taliban. The local police chief in the Buner district, Zubair Shah, a rising star of the Pakistani police force, acknowledged the challenges of confronting a Taliban threat that is more deeply ensconced in communities all over Pakistan than had been thought.
Translation: NATIVES DO NOT LIKE MASS-MURDERING OCCUPIERS!!!!
He is trying to tamp down the Taliban with a police force that is grossly underpaid and frequently overmatched by better armed militants. Currently, the officers in Buner earn about one-quarter the monthly salary that the Taliban are offering, Shah said.
How can that be possible after the BILLIONS we have poured into Pakistan?
Unless we are ARMING "Talibans," too!!!!
Moreover, given that the police have become a primary target of the militants, it is hardly surprising that morale has plummeted. "The people are more motivated than the police," he said. In the tribal areas to the west of the Buner district, the Pakistani army is now encouraging tribal militias, known as lashkars, as a backup force against the Taliban. Such militias have a long tradition in tribal society.
But even there, they have met with little success in the current conflict. By contrast, posses like the one in Buner have not been tried before in the settled parts of Pakistan outside the tribal areas, Khan said. They have in any case become a necessary tool to help preserve the peace.
The citizens of Buner, interviewed in late October after the police arranged an escort to the area, where security is still sketchy, said they had taken matters into their own hands to keep not only the militants at bay, but the army as well. In areas where the army has had to confront the militants, fighting has ensued on the scale of a civil war, displacing tens of thousands of people. If citizens' militias sound like civil war already, that is precisely what the people of Buner say they are hoping to avoid.
And CUI BONO?
Such wrenching violence has been the fate already of the neighboring Swat Valley, and of nearby Bajaur, an area of the tribal region, where the army and militants have been locked in heavy fighting. Civilian casualties are high. The task of pushing back the Taliban is taking longer than the army had anticipated.
In Swat, the army has been unable to stop the burning of more than 100 schools or the murders of politicians and their families. About one-third of the police force has deserted, and some of the deserters have joined the Taliban, even as trainers, according to senior police officials.
Translation: They are tired of WATCHING OCCUPIERS KILL THEIR PEOPLE!!
We are LOSING, folks!!!
The villagers in Buner say they would prefer to handle the Taliban on their own, rather than have the heavy hand of the army come and do it for them. They did it with gusto, lining up the bodies of their Taliban victims at a hospital like trophies so citizens could take a look.
I'm supposed to believe this account, coming from a lying, agenda-pushing, Muslim-hating, Zionist War Daily?
"We don't want happening here what is happening around us," said Mohammed Zada, a retired bank manager, and a driving force behind the peace council. "The people are very unified, so the Taliban failed. We are dead set against the army, too." --more--"
And as if ON CUE:
DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (AP) - A suicide car bomber killed at least eight Pakistani paramilitary troops Sunday in a region near the Afghan border that has been a target in a surge of suspected U.S. missile strikes.
The Pakistani troops were washing their vehicles Sunday when the suicide attacker came, two intelligence officials said. They described the explosion as large and said it destroyed the checkpoint and damaged the front wall of the fort.
