Word: talibanism
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...Pakistani army has won itself some ground, scattering Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan and Swat, but the real challenge lies ahead: how to rebuild a fiercely independent tribal society that has been shredding apart since the 1980s, when the Soviet war in Afghanistan brought in legions of revolutionary preachers and militants - armed with guns, money and the austere Salafist doctrine of Islam - who never departed...
...easy. Consider this scene: at a dusty army camp in Dera Ismael Khan a few weeks back, Pakistan's army commander Ashfaq Parvez Kayani summoned elders, or maliks, from the Mehsud tribe who had been hiding in Karachi, Peshawar and Islamabad from Taliban assassins. Eyewitnesses recount that the elders were so scared of being spied on by the Taliban that they rolled up to the army chief's office with the car windows plastered over with newspapers so their faces couldn't be seen...
...with good reason. General Khan reckons that the Pakistani Taliban have killed over 500 tribal elders since 9/11 for supposedly collaborating with Islamabad and Washington. Even after assurances from the army chief, the Mehsud elders are still afraid to venture back to their lands. "The jihad has eliminated the old tribal system of maliks," says General Khan. "Now any crook with a cell phone can call up a gang of his militant friends for any kind of mischief, and everyone is too afraid to stop them." His former colleague, Brigadier Mahmoud Shah, formerly in charge of security for the Northwest...
Pakistani military officers, politicians and diplomats say that Islamabad has a short window of opportunity to improve the lives of the frontier tribesmen. Otherwise, they will turn angrily against Islamabad and wave in the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters who are now scattered in the mountains. "We need to bring in reforms swiftly," says Shah...
...siphoning off the funds, and because much of the region has been off-limits to aid workers due to militancy, only a tenth of that amount has been spent. Nor can aid wait: the U.N. reckons that over 1.63 million people fled when bullets started flying between the Pakistani Taliban and the army. Their lives need to be rebuilt before they too start blaming Islamabad, and not the militants, for their misery...