Word: swat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Pakistani military saw the original Swat agreement and its concessions on Shari'a law as a way to pacify the bulk of the Taliban's popular support base, while isolating the more implacable jihadist element by denying them a key rallying issue. The generals don't share Clinton's view of the Taliban as some sort of external force invading territory the Pakistani military is obliged to protect; on the contrary, odious though it may be to the country's established political class and to the urban population that lives in the 21st century, the movement appears to be rooted...
...leaders began sounding the alarm last week when the militants, buoyed by a peace agreement that put them into effective control of the Swat Valley, extended their reach by taking control of Buner - a province 60 miles from Pakistan's capital, as every media outlet hastened to explain. Pentagon leaders warned that the militants had become an "existential threat" to the Pakistani state. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the situation as a "mortal danger" to global security and bluntly demanded that the Pakistani military - a recipient of more than $10 billion in U.S. aid over the past decade...
...Pakistani security forces launched an offensive to "eliminate and expel the militants from Buner," as army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas noted. Two weeks ago, Pakistan's parliament had endorsed a peace agreement that involved the imposition of Islamic Shari'a law in the Malakand Division, which includes Swat and Buner. The Taliban insist that it allowed them to maintain an armed presence; the military rejects that claim and made clear its intention to limit the Taliban from further advances. But the U.S. had deemed even the original Malakand deal, which was announced in mid-February, a dangerous concession...
...product of America's unpopular war in Afghanistan. There's little support in the public - or within the ranks of the military - for deploying the military in a sustained civil war against the militants. Many in Pakistan were convinced that the Taliban had exceeded their bounds in Buner and Swat and needed to be pushed back - but not necessarily crushed. Whereas U.S. officials warn of the Taliban as an "existential" threat to Pakistan, the country's own military continues to reserve that status for India, against which the vast bulk of its armed forces remain arrayed...
...propaganda machinery extends beyond the borders of Afghanistan. In Pakistan's Swat Valley, Mullah Qazi Fazlullah, a firebrand Taliban cleric known as "Mullah Radio," has used unlicensed FM stations to effectively paralyze the former resort area, now under militant control. Last week, an editorial from the The News International, a leading English daily, called the Pakistani government's failure to "evolve a counter-narrative to the Taliban propaganda" that fills airwaves and newspaper columns a "dereliction of the highest order...