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Pakistan Launches Air, Ground Attacks Against Taliban
05-10-2009 8:04 am - Andrea Kannapell - NY Times
The Pakistani military pressed its multi-pronged assault on three Taliban-held districts northwest of the capital, Islamabad, on Saturday, claiming significant gains but also blaming militants for endangering noncombatants by firing indiscriminately and basing themselves in civilian homes.

As terrified people continued to flee the fighting, the outskirts of the conflict areas are facing a critical need for more shelter and supplies. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has registered more than 120,000 residents displaced from the three contested districts - Swat, Buner and Dir - and surrounding areas, and warns that several hundred thousand more are likely to leave as well. For the moment, most people are able to find their own shelter, renting space or moving in with extended families in urban areas, the agency said, but such options are rapidly diminishing.

Military statements issued Saturday reported 15 militants killed in helicopter attacks in the Swat Valley district capital, Mingora, and as many as 40 militants killed in other parts of the district, news agencies said. Those claims - and the military’s overall count of more than 140 slain insurgents - are impossible to verify independently, given that aid agencies and journalists are barred from the conflict areas.

A provincial official, Iftikhar Hussain, accused the Taliban of causing civilian deaths. “The militants are using the civilian population as a human shield, and they have dug trenches in civilian areas,” Hussain told reporters at a news conference in Peshawar.

Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani held an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday, calling afterward at a news conference for popular support for the military operations. The army “can only be successful if there is support of the masses,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying.

Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country mired in political and economic crisis, has been deeply divided over its response to the militants, who are still seen in some sectors of the government and military as a secondary threat compared with India and who have actually received some covert support from factions within the intelligence services in the past.

Though the current government has sought to assure the West that it is taking the militants’ advances seriously, the issue has become a great source of tension with the United States, in particular.

After the Sept. 11 attacks and the American-led invasion of Afghanistan to oust al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the United States relied on Pakistan as its most important regional ally and has given Pakistan’s military more than $1 billion a yearsince 2001; but the Taliban managed to regroup in the porous border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan and is now spearheading wars in both countries.

Pakistan intensified its military campaign to reclaim Swat and neighboring districts last week only under intense pressure from Washington, and after enduring months of a regional power struggle with the Taliban.

The Pakistani Army has estimated that a force of about 4,000 militants took advantage of a peace agreement in northwestern Pakistan in February to seize control of much of Swat.

Similar agreements in two areas to the south, the semiautonomous tribal areas of North and South Waziristan, made those regions a ministate for al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, drawing missile strikes by remotely piloted American drone aircraft. The drone strikes might have helped push the Taliban, and some al-Qaeda elements, out of the tribal belt and into Swat, making the valley and its neighboring districts more important to the Taliban.

On Saturday, Pakistani officials said a new missile strike in South Waziristan killed nine people, including six foreign militants, the A.P. reported.

LIBERTYNEWS: You can read this article by New York Times staff writer Andrea Kannapell, reporting from New York City, N.Y., in context here:

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