Word: talibanizing
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After nearly three months of planning, and very public anticipation, Pakistan's military moved on the South Waziristan stronghold of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella group of militants that Pakistani officials say have been behind some 80% of terrorist attacks in the country over the past few years, including the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto and a recent spate of violence that has taken 150 lives in the past two weeks...
...outsiders for income and trade and income - South Waziristan has historically been closed to outsiders. Even in Swat, which political leaders have declared a victory, insurgents are still ambushing military convoys and launching suicide bombings against civilian and security targets, proving, as many local residents have long attested, that Taliban leaders are still present in many of the region's villages...
...remote and largely ungoverned nature of South Waziristan made it the ideal hiding place for foreign militants, al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban fleeing the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Over the years, unmolested by government intervention, various groups of militants fortified their bases and recruited local residents to their cause. From those groups, the Pakistani Taliban emerged in 2003, partly in response to then President General Pervez Musharraf's about-face on support for the Afghan Taliban after the Sept. 11 terror attacks...
...also important that the action in South Waziristan doesn't end with the military operation. In order to fill the power vacuum, the civilian government will have to follow quickly behind with infrastructure, schools, medical clinics and courts - key elements whose absence allowed the Taliban to flourish in the first place. There, too, a lesson can be taken from the Swat experience. Military officials in the Swat Valley recently released thousands of low-level Taliban captives into the custody of local authorities, who have neither the infrastructure to hold nor the facilities to try the militants...
...Taliban-linked Amjad Farooqi group has claimed responsibility for Thursday's attacks, Interior Minister Rehman Malik told reporters in Lahore. The relatively little-known group is named after a Punjabi terrorist who developed links with al-Qaeda through two militant groups from southern Punjab. The same group claimed responsibility for last weekend's siege of the military headquarters in Rawalpindi. (Read "Why Pakistan Must Widen Its Hunt for Militant Bases...