Posted on 10/03/2008 3:50:55 PM PDT by neverdem
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — War has come to Pakistan, not just as terrorist bombings, but as full-scale battles, leaving Pakistanis angry and dismayed as the dead, wounded and displaced turn up right on their doorstep.
An estimated 250,000 people have now fled the helicopters, jets, artillery and mortar fire of the Pakistani Army, and the assaults, intimidation and rough justice of the Taliban who have dug into Pakistan’s tribal areas.
About 20,000 people are so desperate that they have flooded over the border from the Bajaur tribal area to seek safety in Afghanistan.
Many others are crowding around this northwest Pakistani city, where staff members from the United Nations refugee agency are present at nearly a dozen camps.
No reliable casualty figures are available. But the International Committee of the Red Cross flew in a special surgical team from abroad last week to work alongside Pakistani doctors and help treat the wounded in two hospitals, so urgent has the need become.
“This is now a war zone,” said Marco Succi, the spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Not since Pakistan forged an alliance with the United States after 9/11 has the Pakistani Army fought its own people on such a scale and at such close quarters to a major city. After years of relative passivity, the army is now engaged in heavy fighting with the militants on at least three fronts.
The sudden engagement of the Pakistani Army comes after months in which the United States has heaped criticism, behind the scenes and in public, on Pakistan for not doing enough to take on the militants, and increasingly took action into its own hands with drone strikes and even a raid by Special Operations forces in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
But the army campaign has also unfolded as the...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
When you lay down with vermin, prepare to get fleas.
At least it appears they’re starting to actually do something about it.
Lay down with dogs,
get up with fleas.
Pakistan had a lot of help via the Saudi’s.
Oh darn. The taliban just learned a new strategy, Hammer and Anvil.
"In early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border."
I'd rather make the Taliban and Al Qaeda the anvil, and hit them with two hammers since the Pakistanis finally bought a clue. I'd be massing all available U.S., NATO and Afghan forces across that section of the Afghan border.
Wake up America!!!!!!!
If we were NOT winning against the Taliban inside Afghanistan, then they, the Taliban, would not be presenting the problem they are to Pakistan and, if we were NOT so successful in lengthening the stay of the Taliban in their Pakistan enclaves, then Pakistan would have had less motive to be engaging the Taliban so much more now.
The Pakistan military engagement of the Taliban, inside Pakistan is, in fact, a sign we ARE winning against the Taliban inside Afghanistan.
The Pakistan vs Taliban engagements are NOT a sign of a “widening war” (they’ve always had some bases in Pakistan) as it is an inevitable progression of tightening the nooses around the Taliban.
John McCain and Sarah Palin, are you listening???
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