



Recent events in Pakistan have shaken up the international community. The Obama administration, which had been promoting its idea of building up Pakistan by throwing $15 billion at it over the next few years, was rudely awakened by the Pakistan government's deal with Taliban allowing them virtual control over the Swat valley. The blows kept on coming, with suicide attacks in different parts of Pakistan, some of them blatantly on the security forces of the country. The culmination of all of these was the news that the Taliban had started occupying and claiming regions of the Buner district, only a hundred kilometres from Islamabad.



Now, international reaction has been limited to asking Pakistan to rein in Taliban and take all the necessary military action against it. Till now, Pakistan has just been making peace deals and effectively ceding territory to Taliban, without undertaking any military confrontation. Analysts believe that the Pakistani Army is unwilling to do so because they dont know how to fight this guerilla warfare. In all their period of existence, they have been trained to fight a conventional war against India. Fighting a counter-insurgency is not their cup of tea.



Another possible reason could be the army doesnt want to fight its own people. The Pakistani Army gets about 30% of its soldiers from the Pashtun tribal areas. Almost all of its Frontier Guards come from these areas. These soldiers may be unwilling to pick arms against their own people. Third possible reason is that the Army doesnt see this as a war IT needs to fight. The army has become wary due to almost a decade of fighting a war that it never wanted to fight in the first place. This, to them, was and is an "American war". This, coupled with the high anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and the whole of the Muslim world, makes it enormously difficult for the Army to lauch a full fledged operation against the Taliban.



So there are reports that the Taliban may be retreating from the Buner district. This happened after another rounds of dialog between General Ashfaque Kiyani and Sufi Muhammad, the cleric from the Swat Valley. No war, no force used here, just talks. I really do not think this peace is real or is going to last for long.



Buner is part of the Malakand province, which is a very hilly region. The region has a terrain very similar to the Swat valley, and is ideal for fighting a guerilla war, which the Taliban has become an expert in. Now, Taliban vociferously claims that it wants to make the whole of Pakistan a Sharia state, but thats not realistically possible. The might of the Pakistani army is no match for Taliban, more so in the flat plains of Punjab. Hence, it can never cross over beyond Buner, lest the Pakistani army might launch a full fledged attack as a final act of desperation. The logical thing for Taliban to do is fortify its own territory, a territory it is familiar with, where it is comfortable fighting. And the entire territory of the Malakand region perfectly fits those criteria.



It is highly unlikely that Taliban will actually leave Buner. And even if it did, it needs to be realised that Buner is just one of the district in the region. Several other districts bordering the Swat district have reported Taliban presence. It is going to extremely difficult, almost impossible, to get rid of the Taliban in these districts in the near future. While signing the Swat peace deal, the Pakistani government virtually handed over the region to Taliban on a platter. The only solution now is to strengthen the frontiers of whatever remains and ensure the violence doesnt spread to the south, to cities like Peshawar.



It also makes sense in this case to rethink the aid given by the US Government to Pakistan. A majority of this aid was supposed to go the strengthen the infrastructure of the border regions, more specifically the FATA and the NWFP. Since the NWFP is controlled by Taliban and since Pakistani government has no control over the region, it is senseless to waste all that taxpayer money on that region.



Taliban is like a cancer, or a virus, if you will. A cancer is much more manageable when it is contained and benign. The moment it becomes metastatic, it becomes nearly impossible to control. Taliban has now not only spread in the NWFP, but it also has presence in major Pakistani cities and the ability to conduct bomb blasts there. It is slowly morphing into a metastatic cancer. It is very necessary here to contain Taliban as quickly as possible by establishing a Line-of-Control between NWFP and the rest of Pakistan, and here is where the argument of Partition of Pakistan again comes in.



Further readings:

1) Fareed Zakaria: Spiraling chaos possible in Pakistan CNN, USA

2) The alarming rise of Pakistani Taliban Rediff, India

3) How to clear this mess The News, Pakistan



Update:

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