Word: swatting
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...even decided to make last year "Destination Pakistan 2007." But there's the rub. Last year was one of the most troubled in Pakistan's history. Terrorist attacks became a weekly, sometimes daily, occurrence. President Pervez Musharraf threw out the Supreme Court Chief Justice triggering massive street protests. The Swat Valley, a picturesque tourist spot renowned for its skiing and trout fishing, is now, as my colleague Aryn Baker so vividly described just two months ago, Taliban Central. And to end the year, the leading opposition figure was assassinated...
...Fazlullah, a 34-year-old cleric who once earned a living ferrying passengers and goods across the Swat River, got his start studying under Maulana Sufi Mohammed, a religious teacher who founded the Tehrik Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law) in the 1990s. In 2002 the organization was banned, and Mohammed was thrown in jail for mobilizing thousands of his followers to fight American forces in Afghanistan. Fazlullah, who by then was Mohammed's son-in-law, also went to Afghanistan to fight. Radicalized by the experience, and by his short stint in an Afghan...
...Eventually, Fazlullah's didactic sermons started to alienate many of Swat's residents, but by then it was too late - his militia had already established a foothold. Khan, the businessman from Matta, was sent threatening letters after he denounced Fazlullah's men for killing his cousin. "They have spies everywhere," he says. For too long, the central government ignored the problems festering in Swat, concerned that a crackdown on demands for Shari'a would alienate the country's Islam-based political parties. By the time the military tried to intervene, a homegrown insurgency was in full swing. Fazlullah equated resistance...
...Earlier attempts to secure Swat resulted in failure. General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of military operations, says bands of militants as small as eight or nine have been able to take over entire villages. Local security forces often flee when faced with an insurgent onslaught. "If they stand up to fight, they know the gangsters will call in their 50 friends," says Pasha. Pakistan's military - which came of age fighting conventional wars with archrival India - never developed the expertise to tackle domestic insurgencies. The frontier corps, says the Western military official, is undertrained and outgunned. He puts himself...
...long enough to secure low-lying villages. When the fighting is over, says Fazli Raziq, he will return. But his wife Zaibi feels the violence will not end: "I know in my heart that there will never be peace." For her, and for many other Swat villagers, their valley is forever lost...