The Pakistan Army has put militants in Waziristan “on the defensive” and the situation in the Waziristan tribal areas has “cooled down tremendously”, Commander 11 Corps Lt Gen Mohammed Hamid Khan has said. Others disagree. Gen Hamid Khan told Pamela Constable of the Washington Post in an interview in Peshawar that the army had shifted from mass raids to “snap operations” based on intelligence, and now controls key towns once in the hands of militants. However, adds the report published on Tuesday, “other observers say the army’s aggressive efforts since 2004 have backfired, alienating the populace with heavy-handed tactics and undermining the traditional authority of tribal elders and officials. They say that the local Taliban movement, which has close ethnic and theological links to the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan, has won new supporters and been able to carve out enclaves of alternative power”.A Western diplomat in Islamabad told the correspondent that “things are starting to spin out of control and in some areas, it’s beginning to look like they are setting up a government within a government”. Noting that the tribal areas are off-limits to foreign visitors, including journalists, except for periodic, brief helicopter visits with military authorities, the report said that tribal lawyers, educators and politicians with knowledge of events in the areas have described growing fundamentalist influence and intimidation that is spilling beyond the sparsely inhabited tribal zones and edging closer to settled, government-run localities. Fundamentalist clerics have freely used FM radio stations to preach holy war and set up public recruiting offices in towns such as Dir and Bannu just outside the tribal areas. Music stores have been shut down and thieves executed before crowds.
Afrasiab Khattak of the Awami National Party (ANP) told the Post, “North and South Waziristan are in the grip of Talibanisation” and all of the seven federally administered tribal agencies “can come under its grip, too. The army has put up an honest fight, but it has failed, and the government has failed. The traditional system has been made ineffective, and the Taliban have moved into the vacuum.”