The weekend’s action around Peshawar in the Pakistani province Khyber Agency seems to have been a ruse. The Pakistani government sent in local paramilitaries to fight alleged Taliban there. But there was not much of a fight at all. The LA Times writes:
With plenty of warning from officials that troops were coming, Islamic insurgents in the mountainous Bara district outside Peshawar, the provincial capital, had simply melted away, disappearing into a remote valley to the north.
It may have been even more of a show as Syed Saleem Shahzad reports for ATOL:
Riding with the paramilitary convoys was Haji Namdar, the chief of the self-proclaimed pro-Taliban organization Amal Bil Maroof Nahi Anil Munkir that is based in Khyber Agency. His presence was meant to be a secret as his organization was supposed to be one of the targets of the operation.
He was taken along to ensure that encounters with militants were kept to a minimum, as was the case – only four people were arrested and none killed.
The groups temporarily pushed away were local warlords rather than some threatening Taliban. LAT:
[A]lmost no one in Bara’s dusty and deprived main town had anything bad to say about the vanished warlord, Mangal Bagh, an illiterate bus driver-turned-cleric. Bagh maintained law and order, people said, and the shadow government he set up in recent months was more effective than the state-sanctioned one.
As his constituency seems to like him, the man will certainly be back.
The whole campaign was simply a big show put up by the government of Pakistan which is under pressure from Washington and NATO to do something.
Just like the U.S. blames every problem in Iraq on Iran, NATO and the U.S. see every problem in Afghanistan connected to alleged Taliban in Pakistan’s eastern provinces.
The Canadian journalist Graeme Smith says that is wrong. In an interview form Kandahar with RealNews he explains that the center of the insurgency is in Afghanistan. Even if a wall would be build between Pakistan and Afghanistan, he says, the insurgency would just go on as before.
The insurgency uses hit and run methods on a larger scale. They take control over some towns and disperse as soon as ‘western’ troops show up and start dropping bombs. Then the insurgency moves into another area and repeats the scheme. There are too few ‘western’ troops to prevent this.
The result is that people do not feel safe under the protection of the government and its heavy handed ‘western’ enforcers. Kabul loses legitimization and the Taliban start to get tolerated by the people or even win their direct support.
This year Taliban attacks on U.S./NATO and Afghan forces in eastern Afghanistan are up by 40%. Civilian casualties are up by 60%. That certainly does not indicate that ‘western’ forces are winning the contest. They drop bombs whenever they have ‘intelligence’ about the whereabouts of some alleged Taliban leader or group and inevitably kill many civilians. Yesterday 33 ‘militants’ were killed. How many of those were civilians? How many people were wounded in that attack?
Who are these people to turn to for security and to feel safe and protected? Just like the people in Bara, Pakistan, the Afghanis will likely look for local strongmen. The ‘western’ media will then again mistake those for ‘Taliban’.