Word: tribally
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...Correspondents and editors belonging to Pakistan's top local print and TV outlets let loose with accusations and complaints, particularly about American concerns that Pakistan was failing as a state. "There is no Taliban threat," said one Pakistani journalist. "Do you really think a bunch of hillbillies from the tribal areas can take on our military?" sneered another. "It's all propaganda," said a third, designed "to weaken us, so the U.S. can fulfill its agenda to break Pakistan into pieces...
...wilds of Waziristan, the tribal belt along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, make an unlikely showcase for the future of warfare. This is a land stuck in the past: there are few roads, electricity is scarce, and entire communities of ethnic Pashtun tribesmen live as they have for millenniums. And yet it is over this medieval landscape that the U.S. has deployed some of the most sophisticated killing machines ever created, against an enemy that has survived or evaded all other weaponry. If al-Qaeda and the Taliban could not be eliminated by tanks, gunships and missiles, then perhaps they...
...Pakistan. The accelerated attacks have been stepped up under President Barack Obama. Nowadays, the low hum of the drones has become a familiar sound in Waziristan, where tribesmen call them machay, or red bees. Their lethal sting has been felt in villages and hamlets across the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). The main objectives of the campaign: to take out al-Qaeda's top tier of leadership, including Osama bin Laden, and deny sanctuary in FATA for the Taliban and those fighters who routinely slip across the border to attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Combining high-tech video surveillance with...
...militants say that if the Americans want to come and fight, they should fight them face to face," says Mahmood Shah, a retired brigadier who was once the top Pakistani official in FATA. Shah, a Pashtun himself, says the families of the drones' victims are required under the tribal code to seek revenge, which makes them ideal recruits for militant leaders like Baitullah Mehsud, the Pashtun commander of the Pakistani Taliban. Mehsud, says Shah, "likes to boast that each drone attack brings him three or four suicide bombers...
...That resentment is fueled by a belief that Pakistan is suffering for Washington's failures. Zardari may say that the war on terrorism is as much Pakistan's as it is the U.S.'s, but that message has yet to take root. The growing militancy in Pakistan's tribal areas "is the price we are paying now for supporting the American war on terror," says Ahsan Iqbal, information secretary for the opposition party Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz). "If we stopped supporting the American war [in Afghanistan], we would have peace tomorrow." Iqbal dismisses recent accounts in the Western press...