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| India-Pakistan |
| Tribal militants increase coordination |
| 2008-02-04 |
| Disparate militants bands in Pakistan are increasing coordination in their insurgency while the authorities, which should be challenging their spread, are demoralised and fearful, security analysts say. Militants have battled security forces in several parts of the northwest in recent weeks and briefly seized a main road tunnel 50 km from Peshawar late in January. Suicide bombers have killed hundreds of people over the past year, striking in all of the country’s main cities and killing former premier Benazir Bhutto on December 27. The attacks have raised fears about the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan. While there’s no chance of the insurgents defeating the army or holding territory outside remote enclaves on the Afghan border, the violence looks set to intensify. Peace deals backfire: Brigadier (r) Mahmood Shah, a former chief of security in the ethnic Pashtun border lands, said peace deals with the militants in their border hub of Waziristan had backfired. “Unfortunately, the policies of the last few years have helped them in re-establishing themselves, in reorganising and rearming” Shah told Reuters. A Pakistani militant chief, Baitullah Mehsud, who the government and the CIA says was behind Benazir’s murder, was in December declared leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The organisation is for now little more than a name but more coordination would spell trouble, analysts said. Taliban strengthening: “The TTP is 95 percent theory and 5 percent tangible,” said a senior government official who has worked in the tribal areas. “They don’t have a concrete, organised mechanism but things are moving towards that and that would be very dangerous,” said the official, who declined to be identified. “You can only convert the sympathies of the public from these guerrillas by providing what the government should be providing: justice, security, clean hospitals,” said the official. Resentment runs deep in the seven isolated, long-neglected tribal agencies. “The government has nothing for the tribal people but troops, missiles and cobra gunship helicopters,” said Abdul Karim Mehsud, a lawyer from South Waziristan. Former interior minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said he expected violence to intensify before the general election. Attacks on the police had demoralised them while investigators were failing to catch anyone behind the suicide bombs, he said. Afrasiab Khattak, a leader of a Pashtun nationalist party challenging Islamist parties for power in the NWFP in the election, said, “Militants have their own agendas,” he said. “It’s a volcano created in the mountains that is throwing lava on both sides of the border.” |
| Posted by:Fred |