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Pakistan Adopting a Tough Old Tactic to Flush Out Qaeda
At the start of the month, Pakistan massed several thousand troops in and around the town of Wana, near the country's mountainous border with Afghanistan. Using a harsh century-old British method, officials handed local tribal elders a list and issued an ultimatum. If 72 men wanted for sheltering Al Qaeda were not produced, they said, the Pakistani Army would punish the tribe as a group, demolishing houses, withdrawing funds and even detaining tribe members. Several days later, several thousand tribal elders held a jirga, or council, and agreed to raise a force of their own to find the wanted men. In the last two weeks, the tribes have handed over 42 of them. Tribal members, meanwhile, have bulldozed and dynamited the homes of eight men who refused to surrender. The most wanted fugitives, including foreign Qaeda members, remain at large, although as an added incentive, Pakistani officials have promised not to hand over any fugitive Pakistanis to the United States. American officials declined to comment on the policy, but Pakistani officials hope the British method, combined with the American-financed building of roads and schools, will show results. "There is this age-old system of collective responsibility," said Lt. Gen. Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah, the governor of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and a key supporter of the new approach. "Tribes are supposed to help the government." Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the tribal areas that span both sides of the border have proved to be a redoubt for Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere in the area's inaccessible crags. Insurgents have used the border area, home to smugglers and guerrillas for centuries, as a base to carry out cross-border attacks that have killed or wounded dozens of American soldiers. Responding to American pressure, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, deployed soldiers in the tribal areas for the first time in the country's history in the spring of 2002. That provoked bitter protests from hard-line Islamic political parties that won sweeping support in and around the tribal areas in elections that October. All told, Pakistani soldiers and police officers have captured more than 500 suspected Qaeda members, most of them low-level fighters caught fleeing Afghanistan in 2002. More than 70,000 Pakistani soldiers are now deployed in the tribal areas, but over the last year capturing fighters has proved more difficult. Suspected Taliban fighters have killed six Pakistani soldiers carrying out raids in the tribal areas since August. Two Pakistanis were killed by American fire on the border. A senior Pakistani intelligence official said Pakistan has had no reports since 2002 that Mr. bin Laden has been in South Waziristan, the tribal agency whose main town is Wana. Pakistani officials said they would never allow American forces into Pakistan, but conceded that they had been under intense American pressure to act in the tribal areas. They said they hoped the new approach would prove fruitful. There is little expectation that the tribes would abruptly hand over Mr. bin Laden. Instead,the hope is to gradually make the area less hospitable for the Qaeda leader and his backers. Mr. bin Laden is believed to have strong popular support in the tribal areas, the most Posted by: tipper 2004-01-31 |
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