Word: swats
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Close Lamont at 11pm?? How dare you! FlyBy would lead as many all-night sit-ins as as it took to stop this change. Some sort of SWAT team would be necessary. Shots would be fired. People would...
...government, at last, seems to be fighting back. On May 7, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani announced a military operation in Swat. "The armed forces have been called in," he said, "to eliminate the militants and terrorists. We will not bow before extremists." Only weeks before, the government had finalized a peace deal with the militants in which their principal demand - the establishment of Islamic law in the area - was granted in exchange for giving up arms. At first officials defended the deal, even as the militants moved on a neighboring district and their leader announced that democracy was contrary...
...fighting in Swat masks far more serious problems. In Waziristan, a region on the Afghan border, security forces have ceded control to the militants. Outlawed sectarian groups are gaining a foothold in Punjab province. And in the financial capital of Karachi, where Pakistani Taliban insurgents raise funds, ethnic clashes claimed more than 30 lives last month. When U.S. President Barack Obama commented during an April news conference that the Pakistani government did not "seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services - schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people...
...pictures of fighting in the Swat valley...
...Instead, says Samina Ahmed of the International Crisis Group, Zardari's government has muddled the message: rather than punish those who used terrorist tactics, he originally met their demands in Swat. Wajiha Ahmed, a Pakistani-American graduate student at the Fletcher School of Tufts University, hopes that the current chaos holds a "silver lining ... It might put pressure on the military élite and the political oligarchy to finally change the country's outlook so that it focuses on bettering the condition of its people." But for decades, talented exiles - writers, bankers, software engineers and international civil servants - have been...