Word: tribalized
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Agents at a makeshift FBI operations base set up in a smuggler's town in the northern tribal area of Waziristan that's full of former Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives, have to spend as much time guarding against counterattack as scouting. Surveillance of the Pashtun, who live there on hilltops in adobe forts surrounded by 15-foot-high walls, is difficult. The only way that U.S. surveillance can pick up anything is if suddenly one of these medieval-like castles receives a burst of visitors, rumbling up the dusty trails in four-by-fours, but that isn't happening...
...true that CIA and Pakistani agents have worked together to nab al-Qaeda senior aides such as Binalshibh and Palestinian bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan's big cities. But the tribal zone is a different story--a sensitive region. U.S. commandos, now mostly confined to the Afghan side of the border, are rarely allowed to raid possible mountain hideouts on the Pakistan side, whether by themselves or with Pakistani officers. Under the current delicate political climate for the government of Musharraf, say senior U.S. and Pakistani officials, that would be a mission impossible. Many of the deeply religious...
...Pakistan's general elections on Oct. 10, pro-Taliban and al-Qaeda--friendly religious parties won control over border governments in Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier province. "If we start sending American troops on patrol into the tribal areas, we're going to have dead Americans," says a State Department official. Pakistani officials don't believe they would be any more successful. "Ninety percent of the time when we go after someone in there, we fail," says a senior police officer in Quetta. "Our intelligence in these areas is never any good...
...helpless. U.S. Army officers in Afghanistan, along with U.N. and Afghan intelligence officials, are worried that al-Qaeda enclaves have been set up on the Pakistani side of the border under protection from the country's Frontier Corps militia, which Islamabad used during the Taliban era to patrol the tribal regions. "It's our assessment they're assisting al-Qaeda," says Major Mike Richardson, an operations officer with the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne, which patrols the Afghan side. Some intelligence analysts in the region and in Washington also suspect that dissident elements within Pakistan's ISI are still sympathetic...
American investigators are trying to persuade Musharraf to let them expand their bin Laden search into the tribal belt, but the Pakistanis have "a different agenda," says a Western diplomat in Islamabad. "The Americans' aim, obviously, is to get the bad guys." The Pakistani strategy is to extend the government's influence in these lawless areas by winning over the local chieftains, a kind of mini--nation building. That's why Musharraf is wary of mishaps like the one in which two U.S. missiles recently strayed inside the Pakistani border and landed a few hundred yards from a tribal militia...