The army has attacked the warriors everyone thought were exempt from any state reaction to their presence. The army in fact avenged a suicide-bombing against its troops at a checkpost, killing eight soldiers while they were praying, and killed "more than 30 foreign bully boys, most of them Uzbeks".
The targeted Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) posted a statement saying "the military responded with an air-and-ground attack after a group of frustrated fighters had bombed a military convoy."
In the North Waziristan Agency (NWA), Death Eaters and the Pakistain army cohabit under a compact that was broken last month. The army said the "terrorists" were acting up since September: a total of 67 improvised bombs were planted around the checkposts, out of which 27 had went
kaboom!, resulting in deaths and injuries to about a hundred men.
Immediately after the skirmish, however, the army said it was not an operation, meaning it was not what the world wanted Pakistain to do against elements that do cross-border mischief. Paks who think the army should go in to wipe out this snakepit were disappointed.
The Taliban are there too in the NWA. After their old leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed by an American drone, their new leader, Mullah Fazlullah
...son-in-law of holy man Sufi Mohammad. Known as Mullah FM, Fazlullah had the habit of grabbing his FM mike when the mood struck him and bellowing forth sermons. Sufi suckered the Pak govt into imposing Shariah on the Swat Valley and then stepped aside whilst Fazlullah and his Talibs imposed a reign of terror on the populace like they hadn't seen before, at least not for a thousand years or so. For some reason the Pak intel services were never able to locate his transmitter, much less bomb it. After ruling the place like a conquered province for a year or so, Fazlullah's Talibs began gobbling up more territory as they pushed toward Islamabad, at which point as a matter of self-preservation the Mighty Pak Army threw them out and chased them into Afghanistan...
, likely shifted to semi-tribal Dir north of Swat, meaning that, in the NWA, they were put at risk only by the Americans, not Pakistain, whose thousands of civilians and army officers, including generals, they had killed.
A growing pro-Taliban community of politicians has not liked the army's retaliatory attack and is accusing it of having killed innocent non-combatants instead of Taliban or Uzbeks.
Pakistain is juggling a lot of suicidal balls in the air in the NWA: it likes the Haqqani Network which kills inside Afghanistan. It likes militia leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur of the Dawar tribe who too kills in Afghanistan, and tolerates IMU Uzbeks. Add to that the Taliban and the various non-state actors gathered there, conspiring to overthrow the elected government of Pakistain to proclaim a truly Islamic "emirate". Clearly, Pakistain is worried about post-withdrawal Afghanistan and not about the coming "emirate" at home.
Driven by this strategic myopia, the Pakistain army will not strike the non-state actors killing innocent Paks because its strategic view is frozen on India after the American withdrawal. (Quaintly, Soddy Arabia
...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face...
too is strategically frozen on Iran and will not forgive the US for not invading Syria -- knowing full well that Assad's defeat would mean an al-Qaeda government in Syria determined to crush Saudi Arabia.)
With so many "friends" in the NWA, the army is ensconced in the fort of Miranshah
... headquarters of al-Qaeda in Pakistain and likely location of Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Haqqani network has established a
ministatein centered on the town with courts, tax offices and lots of madrassas...
, the capital, and comes out only to "inspect the roads" after clamping curfew -- which is when it is attacked. Nearby, Pak and American citizens, kidnapped for ransom, cower in the hope of getting rescued by a country "strategically" focused on India.
There are four big hornets in this carefully nurtured nest: the Taliban, the Haqqanis, the Uzbeks and the Punjabi Taliban with sub-groups, all under the umbrella of al-Qaeda. The leader of the Haqqani Network, Jalaluddin Haqqani, is an Afghan Taliban leader who has an "additional" Arab wife and speaks Arabic, which makes him open to Arab funding and interface with al-Qaeda -- and adds the Arab factor in Pakistain's softness towards him.
A military analyst last month explained why Pakistain will not attack the NWA: "If the state were to begin its operation in North Waziristan with the nexus between [Pak and Afghan Taliban] intact, the Afghan Taliban are certain to be sucked into the vortex. The state will still succeed [sic] with its immense potential, but would render itself [open] to far greater strategic injury because of the time and effort it will need to give to a resulting consequence."
A safe way of holding out the white hanky on a gun the army is reluctant to fire.
A leader of Imran Khan
... aka
Taliban Khan, who isn't your heaviest-duty thinker, maybe not even among the top five...
's Tehrik-e-Insaf
...a political party in Pakistan. PTI was founded by former Pakistani cricket captain and philanthropist Imran Khan. The party's slogan is
Justice, Humanity and Self Esteem, each of which is open to widely divergent interpretations....
party claimed last year the army had told the party's leadership that an invasion of the NWA had only a 40 per cent chance of success.
Pakistain has fallen out with the US because of the latter's drone attacks on Pak territory, over 95 per cent of which have hit targets in the NWA. On the question of drones, Pakistain has an internal political consensus -- and some traction with human rights
...which are usually open to widely divergent definitions...
organizations -- but is completely isolated politically at the global level.
Pakistain sheltered the Afghan Taliban who have returned love with hatred. Pakistain has a very murky equation with the Pak Taliban and al-Qaeda -- now collaborative, now hostile -- while people are pointing fingers at how the military-dominated deep state got rid of ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto
... 11th Prime Minister of Pakistain in two non-consecutive terms from 1988 until 1990 and 1993 until 1996. She was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistain People's Party, who was murdered at the instigation of General Ayub Khan. She was murdered in her turn by person or persons unknown while campaigning in late 2007. Suspects include, to note just a few, Baitullah Mehsud, General Pervez Musharraf, the ISI, al-Qaeda in Pakistain, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who shows remarkably little curiosity about who done her in...
through Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud. Journalist Saleem Shahzad had to die after disclosing that dozens of officers of the Pakistain navy had joined al-Qaeda and that a Kashmire jihad veteran, Ilyas Kashmiri, who had joined al-Qaeda, finally got his Death Eaters to attack the Mehran naval base in Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
to get them rescued from the navy's confinement.
There is more news about the army's interface with the terrorists-- often its strategic instrument. In his book Inside al Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11 (2011), Saleem Shahzad had revealed that Major Haroon Ashiq had defected to al-Qaeda because his brother, Captain Khurram, had earlier joined al-Qaeda and died fighting NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
forces in Helmand
...an Afghan province populated mostly by Pashtuns, adjacent to Injun country in Pak Balochistan...
in Afghanistan. Haroon languishes in Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi, after being acquitted of murdering Major General (Retd) Alavi in Islamabad in 2008 at the behest of al-Qaeda.
Haroon left the army and joined Lashkar-e-Taiba
...the
Army of the Pure,an Ahl-e-Hadith terror organization founded by Hafiz Saeed. LeT masquerades behind the Jamaat-ud-Dawa facade within Pakistain and periodically blows things up and kills people in India. Despite the fact that it is
banned, always an interesting concept in Pakistain, the organization remains an blatant tool and perhaps an arm of the ISI...
which, he told Shahzad, was an extension of the army. Alienated from the army under Musharraf, he joined Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami and thus got closer to al-Qaeda. An al-Qaeda terrorist, Haroon enjoyed contacts inside the army.
Another person hiding today in North Waziristan, which the army will not invade, is an air force officer, Adnan Rasheed. His road to terrorism began with the Tablighi Jamaat
A group of itinerant Deobandi preachers who form one of al-Qaeda's recruiting arms...
, universally thought to be a harmless apolitical proselytising annual rally, and ended within the fold of Jaish-e-Muhammad, whose leader Masood Azhar was sprung from an Indian jail through a swap between him and passengers of an Indian airliner hijacked from Nepal. Rasheed took his terrorism training at a JeM camp in Mansehra
...
a city and an eponymous district in eastern Khyber-Pakthunwa, nestled snug up against Pak Kashmir, with Kohistan and Diamir to the north and Abbottabad to the south...near Abbottabad
... A pleasant city located only 30 convenient miles from Islamabad. The city is noted for its nice weather and good schools. It is the site of Pakistain's military academy, which was within comfortable walking distance of the residence of the late Osama bin Laden....
but was nabbed by the army after an inquiry into the al-Qaeda conversions in the air force. The Taliban bribed his transfer from Rawalpindi jail to a less secure Bannu jail, from where it easily got him freed. This air force officer is now the biggest threat to Pakistain at the head of Ansarul Mujahideen. He broke into the Dera Ismail Khan
... the Pearl of Pashtunistan ...
jail and took away all the Taliban prisoners while killing the Shia inmates.
On December 30, 2013, Lahore-based Dunya TV channel showed the late chief prosecutor of the Federal Investigation Agency saying that he had got close to solving the mystery of Benazir Bhutto's liquidation and was going to involve officers from the ISI and military intelligence in the inquiry. On May 3, 2013, Chaudhry Zulfiqar was target-killed in Islamabad by al-Qaeda members, one of whom was the son of a retired brigadier.