Voice from Waziristan

Re: # 67

Economical integration with hand in hand with political integartion is the only solution. One without the other is abmysal failure.

Re: # 66

Strange as it may seem the tribals are allotted a dozen of seats in the National Assembly of Pakistan to partake in making laws for the country which do not apply upon them. Moreover they are allowed utilities like electricity but they seldom pay the bill for it. WAPDA which is a terror for Pakies in general becomes a 'bheegi bili, vis a vis, the tribals.

An acquantis of mine, an XEN WAPDA, appoited in the tribal areas once narrated the following story to me of his altercation with a tribal:

XEN: Khan why don't you pay the bill.

Khan: What for?

XEN: For the electricity you used.

Khan: Who used eletricity? 'Kho chih' your electricity comes in through one wire and goes out through the other. I don't take out any of it. On the other hand it fuses my bulbs some time.

Only a tribal can dare say such a thing to WAPDA.

Fellow Pakistanis,

There is nothing to rejoice for us Indians over what is happening in swat. Ironically the safest place for Pakistani Army is LOC.

Correct me if I am wrong. The problem with tribal areas is that they never integrated with main land Pakistan and it's culture. However great administrator Mr. Jinnah was, he made this great mistake. He never integrated the tribes in Ferderal main stream and gave them too much autonomy.

Coming back to what I was going to post.

Zee,

we have discussed this in the past. In our first interact you had said we are like this only and I had told you then change.

Many of you are fond of saying that there is a Surah in the koran that says (Though a former VHP colleague who is a Hafeez say it is untrue) "Who saves one life saves manking and who kills one kill entire mankind", in light of this what do you suppose you attitude should be.

If AQ is justified in striking America for its support to Israel then so is America hustified in retaliating against those it considers supporters of AQ.

Anyway the moot point to be considered is how can you cut your losses without invoking the wrath of either side (Waziris and America) to see that this deshat gardi is stopped in both your country and ours.

Sanatani

Re: # 56

I was going to reply to your post but could not find it. 1st typed zee then zeem I recall reading the Pakistan urdu primer that Zeem se Zalim show s a Sikh. Are you Zalim or Sikh?

Sanatani

By Monday, however, they had retreated to their fortified positions. In Kabal, the police and the Frontier Corps troops had to retreat inside the large police station compound and build fortifications to ward off attacks by local fighters.

In sharp contrast, armed local Taleban man a check-post in full strength, barely 50 metres down the street from the police station.

"In battle, government troops are only trained to run away," remarks Akbar Hussain, the Taleban commander for Kabal region.

"We don't want to kill them because they are also Muslim, but [the country's military ruler] Gen Musharraf is using them to advance the Americans' agenda."
/////////////

The above is from bbc. It has only confirmed what I had been posting, teh pak troops are only trained to run away or to surrender. No other country would have named teh greatest surrender general a Tiger, tiger Niazi.

Thanks Zee,

The tribal areas seem to have gone once and for all for pakistan. Since it is not part of pakistan, now the US can call in the B52s. It is time that Pakistan formally renounce AWFP.

By the way, did you know that earlier there was east and west pakistan, and after Bangladesh was created, nothing was done to rename teh west pakistan as " pakistan".

So the same process can be continued, the NWFP is gone, but still it is pakistan. By teh way the nukes were meant to protect the territorial integrity of pakistan, nuking teh tribals appear to be the best option.

Dear Mr. Ahmadmadani,

(It appears foreign powers ( indo,afghan) are involved in this type of activity.)

If what you are saying is true, this would prove my friend Manto mian's allegation of a Gandhian-Deobandi conspiracy againt the bholi bhali Pak Awaam.

(And greedy people advocating more trade with India. )

Why would greedy people advocating Indo-Pak trade want to blow up the Sargodha Air base.

Regards

madani saab 59,

You might be correct in the indian support for the tribals and possibly it is known to the pak troops. Another 40 have surrendered to teh tribals today. It may take a while to beat the dacca record, but we are on track.

Re: # 55 Indo/afghan terror raw type people may be paying for suicide bombers. One has to take in to account, the attack occured in Sindh on aerobase which keeps tight attention indian air acrivity. Sakkar and Badin arbases and raders can become target as Surgodha, sukkar and Badin trilaterally keep air spacesafe and watch carefully all air activity in India.It appears foreign powers ( indo,afghan) are involved in this type of activity. And greedy people advocating more trade with India.

Re: # 55

"Surrendering to the indians appear to be the best option for the pak troops at present."

What an option!

But who will get them freed now? Benazir, the daughter of Bhutto who had got 90,ooo of them freed previously but got hanged in recompense.

zee

I told you - kill your own kanjaroons, that a fight you can win... don't even think about hinuds... we will nuke your a## before you can say allah... muslim life means nothing to us - you know that already don't you? :)

#55 Posted by jayp,

There's an order to all this mayhem. After we get this sorted out, we're coming after you ... so rejoice while you can.

The great paki army modelled on the jihadic priciples and the traditions of Gaznavi are being hunted by teh tribals of waziristan. In waziristan the paki troops are surrendering, and now they are being killed in islamabad. What a set of sad policies, teh strategic depth notion taht created the taliban is driving the pak troops to the arabian sea, or to another surrender ceremony, this time at teh wagha border.
Surrendering to the indians appear to be the best option for the pak troops at present.

from dawn of today. Zeemax, where are you, bagdad has come to pakistan. Pakistan banega iraq...well it is similar to kashmir banega pakistan..isnt it.

Suicide attack on Pakistan air force bus kills eight ISLAMABAD, Nov 1 (AFP): - A suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden motorbike into a bus carrying Pakistani air force officials on Thursday, killing at least eight and wounding 40 others, officials said. Private TV channels reported that the death toll had risen to nine. “The bus was carrying trainee flying officers when it was attacked by the suicide bomber” in the Sargodha district of central Punjab province, interior ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Cheema told AFP. “Eight air force officials died in the terrorist attack,” Cheema said, and around 40 were wounded. “It was a suicide attack and the target was the bus which was carrying the air force officials,” chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad said. The dead included a squadron leader, two airmen and five trainee flying officers, security officials said on condition of anonymity. The bomber's dismembered head was found at the scene while some pieces of his body were stuck to the exterior of the bus, police officer Hamid Javed said. The bus itself was badly mangled in the blast. “It was a huge bang and was heard several kilometres away,” a police officer said. Ambulances raced the casualties to local

surrender monkeys gets their butts kicked...

INSIGHT: Troubled state —Ejaz Haider

The state’s approach to insurgency in parts of the North-West Frontier Province, right now in Swat, suffers from two problems. Let’s begin with the first and the most glaring one: the frontier is all but lost. And it’s a full-spectrum failure, ranging from military reverses to political and ideological loss.

This is not a pessimistic view; it’s a realistic assessment. Consider.

What is happening in Swat is a replay of what we have seen in Waziristan, what we are witnessing in other tribal agencies, Bajaur for instance, and what we shall witness in the settled lowlands of NWFP if this tide cannot be stemmed.

The military defeat is obvious. Forget the drubbing the security forces have got in Waziristan. In Swat’s Kabal area, the so-called peace, the tense calm, is not a product of the two sides realising that neither can defeat the other and therefore both must disengage and find a solution, but the extremists holding fire because the security forces have blinked and want to resolve the issue through a jirga.

“Resolution” in all such cases means one thing: acceptance of loss of control and territory to non-state actors. As someone said, while one should never fear to negotiate, one should never negotiate out of fear.

The security forces have no response to the simple and effective weapon, the suicide bomber. Two suicide attacks, kidnappings of security forces personnel and beheadings, three of them publicly, have done two things: inflicted on the state a heavy cost of mobilisation and sent the security forces suing for peace.

The cost factor, direct and indirect, cannot be ignored. How much does a suicide belt cost? RDX is easy enough to procure; the rest — ball-bearings, nails, sharp metal pieces etc — can be got from a local machinist. This shouldn’t be more than a max of Rs10,000, RDX counted. Using a vehicle is more expensive, but even that is a fraction of the cost of a helicopter gunship flight.

This cost differential has also to be seen in relation to effectiveness. How effective has the state been in establishing its writ and taking out the militants? Has the sledgehammer killed the fly? No.

Why? As Hannah Arendt said in her essay On Violence, quoting from Vladimir Dedijer’s The Poor Man’s Power: “...in conventional warfare the poor countries are much less vulnerable than the great powers precisely because they are ‘under-developed’, and because technical superiority can ‘be much more of a liability than an asset’ in guerrilla war.”

True enough. Barry Posen spoke of the “contested zone” where hi-tech largely becomes useless in the face of a determined adversary. Students of warfare know how difficult it is to engage and win against an adversary that is difficult to identify and has the advantage of terrain, kinship bonds and internal lines of communication.

Add to this list, in this case, the fact that the security forces are fighting people who belong to the same tribes and areas from where the army and paramilitaries get a high percentage of their recruitment, that the security personnel also have the same conservative approach to religion, that the military operations are politically unpopular in the country and we have a situation that is hopeless from the perspective of the state.

At the minimum it puts tremendous strain on the organisational cohesion and operational effectiveness of the security forces. Dr Rasul Bakhsh Rais wrote an incisive piece in this space on Tuesday asking “Whose war is this?” The answer, if we go by majority opinion in this country is, America’s.

This brings us to the second problem. Even if we discount the military disadvantage the security forces have in exactly the same proportion that the militants have the advantage on the ground, we have a scary scenario: the state may be trying to do something for which it has no popular, political backing.

A double-whammy it would be. It has lost territory and control against the militants on the periphery and since its struggle is not backed by popular opinion in the country, it may have forfeited its legitimacy — or be in the process of losing it — at the centre also.

The point is that carrying out a military operation is difficult enough under the circumstances; but it is downright hopeless when the very approach is considered flawed by the people. Let’s consider the argument in favour of a political, reconciliatory approach.

One point needs clarification at the very outset. Military alone cannot deliver a solution and — as should be clear from excerpts we are carrying from Clausewitz’ On War — its use has to be part of a viable policy. In areas hit by insurgency and strife, the military’s primary function is to create space for negotiations from a position of strength.

What kind of political solution can we expect when the state has capitulated militarily before the militants? Logically, such a solution cannot be in favour of the state. There is no concept of negotiations between a victor and a vanquished. The latter simply has to accept the demands imposed on it by the former.

If this is what we mean by a political process then the best thing to do would be to pull back the army and allow the militants to take over and create their own laws and political system in the areas liberated from state control. If everyone is happy with this victory, so be it.

But let’s take this to its logical conclusion. If the rest of Pakistan is not comfortable with the system the militants want, then the logic of ending the military operation in the NWFP would take us to accepting that the state has lost the major part of its cis-Indus territories, at least west of Attock.

Once that happens and it will, going by this logic, then external actors will move into the power vacuum to neutralise an adversary they consider as a clear-and-present danger. Are we prepared to accept that?

Here’s the paradox then: the military has so far been ineffective and its presence is being criticised; but if it is pulled back, we might as well say goodbye to state control in the NWFP.

Is there a solution?

If the logic of pulling back the military is not accepted and the assumption is that it is not, unless we want the scenario presented above, then the issue that needs to be addressed is whether and how the military can be used more effectively. That issue needs to be tackled separately; it is also a tale of ironies. We shall return to it.

#52 kaalchakra: did you mean Arjun VI?