Word: pakistani
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...mountains to pick off enemy troops one by one. Their weapons have evolved from arrows to rocket-propelled grenades, but their deadly tactics have not. The Wazir humbled the Mughals in the 16th century and the British in the 19th and 20th centuries. Last month, it was the Pakistani army's turn. In an April 17 ceremony, Pakistani Lieut. General Safdar Hussain signed a truce with the leaders of the tribal forces, ending a brief, bloody and largely ineffective campaign to root out extremist militants and terrorists hiding among sympathizers in Waziristan's villages. Hussain showed up for the cease...
...Pakistan's army was surprised, so too were the country's American allies. Under pressure to score a victory in the war on terror as unambiguous as the capture of Saddam Hussein, the Bush Administration prodded Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to send 11,000 troops into the country's semiautonomous tribal area in March on a search-and-destroy mission. The quarry: top Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters believed to be hiding out in tribal lands since being routed from Afghanistan three years ago by U.S.-led coalition forces. Some optimists even thought Osama bin Laden might be plotting...
...From a military standpoint, the spring offensive was straightforward. Pakistani troops swept into Wazir villages while American soldiers in Afghanistan braced near the border to smash al-Qaeda fighters flushed out by the Pakistani advance?"a hammer and anvil" approach, as one U.S. general confidently called it, that never developed. Judging from the daily communiqu?s by U.S. military spokesmen in Kabul, the enemy was as elusive as ever, emerging only to ambush American patrols. One such attack led to the death of 27-year-old U.S. professional football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman...
...Pakistani forces suffered constant harassment. According to one Islamabad-based Western diplomat, "the Pakistanis would come along the road with 200 trucks lined up, and within minutes, every al-Qaeda and Taliban knew they were here." Other tribes joined the Wazir in raids against government troops, raising fears that a prolonged campaign could escalate into a full-blown tribal uprising all along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. There was never a sign of bin Laden, nor was there a sighting of his No. 2, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, rumored, wrongly as it turned out, to be in Waziristan...
...Privately, Pakistanis grumble that the U.S. and its coalition partners are pushing too hard and as a result the Pakistani army rushed headlong into Waziristan unprepared for the resistance it faced. "Yes, we're impatient," conceded one Western diplomat in Islamabad. "But we're operating against the unknown deadline of a major terrorist attack in the U.S. That's what drives us." Another Islamabad-based diplomat claimed that lately Western intelligence was picking up "lots of chatter" from its electronic eavesdropping and informants that "something very nasty was being planned out of Pakistan...