Word: swats
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...this is not Afghanistan. It is the Swat Valley, Pakistan's biggest tourist destination, home to the country's only ski slope and a haven for trout-fishing. Its people are deeply conservative Muslims, yet highly tolerant of the liberal ways of international visitors. In recent months, however, Swat has changed. Maulana Fazlullah, a fundamentalist preacher known as the "FM Mullah" for his daily radio sermons, has launched a campaign for the establishment of Islamic law, or Shari'a, in the valley. Fazlullah is backed by Pakistani extremists who share an Islamist ideology with the Afghan Taliban next door. These...
...This week the military launched an operation to reclaim control of Swat, sending in 15,000 troops, helicopters, tanks and armored vehicles to battle a ragtag army of some 500 militants. The goal is to push them back into their mountain redoubts, far from the civilian population. "We will bottle up as many of them as possible, and then eliminate them," says General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, Director General of Military operations. The army says that hundreds of militants have already been killed. That's a number militant spokesman Sirajuddin, who only has one name, dismisses as "totally rubbish. Only...
...Pakistani military, which came of age fighting archrival India on more conventional battlegrounds, is little prepared to face a classic guerrilla insurgency. While some of Swat's militants are foreign, the majority are home-grown, nourished on local antipathy to a government that doesn't represent their wishes, and allowed to fester by political parties loath to alienate the religious vote by cracking down on demands for Sharia. "The people want the militancy to stop," says Adnan Aurangzeb, a former member of Parliament from Swat, and the grandson of the valley's last princely ruler. "The militants have stopped tourism...
...Fazlullah, a local student who once earned a living ferrying passengers and goods across the Swat river, got his start studying under Maulana Sufi Muhammad, a religious teacher who founded the Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammaidi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law) in the 1990s. In 2002, TNSM was banned, and Muhammad thrown in jail for mobilizing thousands of his followers to fight American forces in Afghanistan. Fazlullah, by then his son-in-law, continued the campaign for Sharia using the platform of his popular radio show...
...government will ever go that far, the newly appointed Vice Chief of Army Staff, Ashfaq Kyani, who is slated to take over from Musharraf when he retires as army chief, is already taking steps to remedy some of the military's worst problems. On Monday, he visited troops in Swat to raise morale and is taking concrete steps to get them more training and equipment. Even as U.S. military commanders return again and again to well-thumbed counterinsurgency textbooks dating to Vietnam to help with current engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan too has to learn the art of counterinsurgency...