Word: pakistani
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...Pakistani general, Nadeem Ahmed, recently said preparation for such an operation could take up to two months. Now there will be no ground assault at all, according to a senior Pakistani politician known to have strong military ties. Instead, the politician tells TIME, the military will try to buy off some TTP factions through peace deals...
This alarms U.S. officials, who point out that terrorist leaders have previously used peace deals to expand their influence. Such deals have been "abject failures that at the end of the day have made the security situation in parts of Pakistan worse," says a U.S. counterterrorism official. "Why the Pakistani government keeps returning to this strategy is a mystery." (See pictures of Pakistan beneath the surface...
...senior Pakistani military official tells TIME a ground operation in the mountainous wilds of South Waziristan would be too difficult and would risk triggering a "tribal uprising" in a region over which Islamabad has little control...
That assessment is shared by some Pakistan experts in Washington, who say the country's military, despite some success against militants in the Swat Valley, simply doesn't have the ability to confront the TTP head-on. A ground operation would leave the Pakistani army "with its nose bloodied," says Daniel Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations. Having "come out of Swat looking reasonably good," Pakistan's generals don't want to risk "taking a morale hit." (Read "Are Pakistan's Taliban Leaders Fighting Among Themselves...
...experts - like some U.S. officials - suspect the Pakistani military lacks the desire to eliminate the TTP entirely. Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, who conducted the Obama Administration's review of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy, says the military may simply want "to get the TTP back to where it was two years ago - a malleable force that doesn't attack the Pakistani state, and particularly not the army." A somewhat tame TTP is a useful bogeyman "to keep civilians appreciative of the need for the army to be getting resources and priority attention," Riedel adds...