Word: tribalism
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...three times as many as in the previous year, Human Rights Watch reported, amid a dispute over civilian fatalities in an Aug. 22 attack. New video footage has prompted U.S. investigators to re-examine their initial conclusion that most of the strike's casualties were Taliban. One tribal elder offered to dig up victims' graves to prove their innocence...
Pakistan is in crisis. Islamic extremism has metastasized from the lawless tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan to Pakistan's cities. Terrorists tried, and failed, to assassinate the Prime Minister in the capital, Islamabad, on Sept. 3. The nation's economy is a shambles. And Asif Ali Zardari, the man who has just taken the helm of this nuclear-armed country, is a onetime playboy who has spent more time in prison than in government and who wriggled out of a 2006 corruption trial in Britain by pleading mental instability...
...also been its enabler. As the focus of the U.S.'s war on terrorism has moved from Afghanistan to Iraq and back again, there is a widely dawning realization that its central front is actually Pakistan. Here in the mountainous northwestern fringes of the nation, where a fierce tribal code values honor and the protection of guests, that Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants are thought to be hiding. From these tribal areas, al-Qaeda and remnants of the Afghan Taliban, protected by their Pakistani friends, have launched attacks into Afghanistan, dragging the U.S. and its allies into...
...intelligence community believes that al-Qaeda has regrouped in Pakistan's ungoverned tribal territories abutting Afghanistan and that this area now serves as a staging ground for the movement's activities not only in Afghanistan but worldwide. The billions of dollars the U.S. has pumped into training and equipping the Pakistani military appears to have produced neither a capability nor a will to decisively tackle the problem. Many in Washington even suspect that members of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence spy agency are actively supporting Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders and may be tipping them off about planned attacks...
...Some former military leaders have already admitted the need for a fundamental change. "You cannot treat the two sides of the border as two different war zones," says Jehanzeb Raja, a retired brigadier who served in the tribal areas. "The Pakistan Army's aversion to any Predator or missile strike into Pakistan territory to kill the Taliban is tactically defeatist in essence, and strategically flawed in concept," he recently wrote in a local newspaper. "The Pakistan Army not only lacks any worthwhile real-time surveillance capability to pursue multiple targets in these remote regions, it also lacks the means...