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In Drive Against Taliban, Pakistani Airstrikes Hit Strongholds In Drive Against Militants, Pakistani Airstrikes Hit Strongholds
(about 9 hours later)
LONDON — Pakistani fighter jets attacked Taliban strongholds on Monday, and Islamist fighters retaliated with a roadside bombing, as a long-expected military operation in North Waziristan, the country’s most lawless tribal district, moved into its second day. LONDON — As a full Pakistani military offensive in the tribal district of North Waziristan took shape on Monday, commanders promised a crushing blow to the jihadi groups that have flourished there in the past decade, endangering security across the region and in the West as well.
The Pakistani military command said in a statement that it had attacked six targets in the district and killed 27 militant fighters. Most of the strikes occurred in the Shawal Valley, a thickly forested highland area that Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters use as a sanctuary. Tanks rolled through the streets of Miram Shah, the district’s main town, as jet fighters pounded targets in a nearby valley and tens of thousands of residents fled to safer areas out of fear of an impending ground assault.
Several hours later, the military reported that at least six soldiers were killed when an explosion struck their convoy north of Miram Shah, the main town in North Waziristan. Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, vowed to disrupt militant sanctuaries “without any discrimination” — a reference to the wide variety of militant groups, from the Taliban to Al Qaeda and the Haqqani network, that are based in North Waziristan and have drawn strength from their ability to share money, manpower and ideology.
The action on Sunday and Monday, with a combined reported death toll of at least 167 people, suggested that the military’s Waziristan campaign will initially be waged mainly from the air. But the looming battle will also be decided, experts and analysts said, in Pakistan’s major towns and cities, where the Taliban have threatened to exact violent retribution through mass mayhem. “By God, we will soon shake your palaces in Islamabad and Lahore and burn those to ashes,” the Taliban spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid, said in a statement on Monday.
The military has said little else about the scope of the operation, except to note that artillery and ground troops will also be used. One official told Agence France-Presse that as many as 30,000 soldiers could be involved. The number and virulence of any Taliban reprisals will offer a measure of how deeply the Islamist insurgents have penetrated mainstream society, experts say.
The military’s casualty figures could not be independently confirmed because the tribal belt is inaccessible to outside journalists, and local journalists operate under considerable restrictions. With the militants also threatening to attack foreign airlines and business interests, they could inflict further damage on an economy already crippled by years of violent upheaval. And a rash of attacks would starkly test the ability of the country’s security forces — police and intelligence as well as military — to confront and defeat them.
Pakistanis in the rest of the country are girding for possible reprisal attacks in major cities. Still, public opinion seems largely to support the operation, which the army calls Zarb-e-Azb, or Strike of the Prophet’s Sword. “Operation at last!” read Monday’s front-page headline in The Nation, a conservative English-language daily. “Establishing control in North Waziristan won’t be the biggest issue,” said Ayaz Amir, a former member of Parliament and a commentator. “The problem will lie in the militants’ pockets of support across the country.”
In a brief speech to the Pakistani Parliament on Monday, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif tried to address speculation that there had been disagreement between his government and the military over the offensive. He called it a joint decision that became necessary after the Pakistani Taliban kept up a barrage of attacks during attempts to engage them in peace talks. The jittery atmosphere was evident on Monday as soldiers patrolled the streets of Islamabad, and counterterrorism officials across the country arrested militant suspects as part of an effort to discover militant sleeper cells and pre-empt suicide bombings.
“We were talking to these groups and being attacked at the same time,” he said. Mr. Sharif recounted attacks on an Islamabad court and last week’s siege of the Karachi airport, noting that Pakistani citizens no longer felt safe. He said his government was committed to restoring peace in Pakistan. But the main focus was North Waziristan, where the military operation entered its second day. American-made F-16 jets struck targets in the Shawal Valley, a thickly forested highland area and notorious militant hide-out, the military said.
Mr. Sharif said that while there may have been different opinions about a military operation and peace negotiations in the past, “this chapter now has to be closed.” An intelligence official in Peshawar said one of those strikes had hit an abandoned school and killed 13 people, six of whom were members of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a jihadist group with Taliban ties that played a central role in an audacious assault on the Karachi airport a week ago. Hours later, a Taliban roadside bomb ripped through a military convoy north of Miram Shah, killing at least six soldiers.
Mr. Sharif’s main political rival, Imran Khan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, has routinely criticized the Sharif administration for not being serious about negotiating with militant groups. However, television channels reported on Wednesday that Mr. Khan’s party would be backing the military operation. A brigade of about 2,300 soldiers was moved into North Waziristan on Sunday, bringing the total strength in North Waziristan to about 20,000 soldiers, including paramilitary forces, a military official in Peshawar said.
Public opinion in Pakistan has long been divided on whether to try to end the Taliban insurgency through negotiations. But the militant attack on the Karachi airport last week, which killed at least 36 people and temporarily closed the airfield, has been seen as a humiliation and has galvanized opinion in favor of military action. The military has tightly controlled the flow of information from North Waziristan, which has been sealed off since Sunday and is generally a dangerous environment for the handful of journalists who work there. A more detailed picture of the situation is likely to emerge as fighting progresses in the coming days.
Even so, experts warn that the Taliban has a broad network of militant supporters across the country, some of them in allied jihadist groups, which could be used to hit back. More difficult to control, though, is the situation in the major cities, where militants have a history of killing and kidnapping civilians, sabotaging the economy and outgunning the regular security forces. One major concern is an explosion of jihadi unrest in Punjab Province’s rural south, where militant madrassas have quietly proliferated in recent years.
On Monday in Multan, a city in Punjab Province, unidentified gunmen abducted a nephew of the country’s chief justice, police officials and family members said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, and it was not clear whether the abduction was related to the North Waziristan offensive. But one of the victim’s relatives, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the missing man worked as a junior official at Inter-Services Intelligence, the country’s powerful spy agency. Unidentified gunmen on Monday abducted a nephew of the country’s chief justice in Multan, a city in southern Punjab, police officials and family members said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but immediate suspicions fell on militants operating in the area. One of the victim’s relatives, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the missing man worked as a junior official at Inter-Services Intelligence, the military’s powerful spy agency.
The army said on Monday that it had blocked all entry points between North Waziristan and the rest of Pakistan, and had requested assistance from the Afghan government in sealing North Waziristan’s border with the Afghan province of Khost. The other major worry is Karachi, a city of 20 million people that has seen a gradual infiltration of Taliban fighters and sympathizers, many of whom have slipped into the city in the guise of refugees over the past five years.
A Taliban commander, speaking by telephone from Waziristan, said that surveillance drones were seen in the skies over the district, showing that the United States was helping Pakistan with its offensive. “They are jointly conducting this operation against us, helping each other and sharing intelligence,” he said. A senior counterterrorism officer in Karachi, speaking on condition of anonymity, identified a militant cell from the Mohmand tribal agency, near Peshawar, as the most dangerous Taliban group. “They could target governmental installation, foreign companies or prominent personalities,” he said.
The Pakistani army, however, has its own drones and recently started using them over Waziristan. Unlike some American drones, the Pakistani drones carry no weapons. Since Sunday, the Karachi police have mounted raids on suspected Taliban hide-outs in the city and detained a number of suspects, he said. Sharifuddin Memon, an adviser to the provincial home ministry, said that all refugees would be registered as they entered Karachi. The authorities will not permit any new refugee camps to be established on the edge of the city, he said.
The Taliban warned foreign companies and airlines to leave Pakistan or risk becoming targets in the conflict. “They should immediately suspend their ongoing matters with Pakistan and prepare to leave Pakistan, otherwise they will be responsible for their own loss,” a Taliban spokesman, Shahidullah Shahid, said in a statement. Capability issues aside, one major problem for the security forces in frontally tackling Islamist violence is the military’s continuing ambiguity toward some jihadi groups that are popularly known as the “good Taliban” in Pakistan.
After seven years of bloodshed that has killed thousands of Pakistani civilians and soldiers, the military is trying to tackle the militants in their tribal-belt stronghold. “These enemies of the state will be denied space anywhere across the country,” said a military statement issued shortly after the operation started on Sunday. For example, the North Waziristan offensive takes place in a district that is dominated by the Haqqani network, a fighting group that stages attacks in Afghanistan and has traditionally had close ties to Pakistani intelligence — one American general went as far as to call it a “virtual arm” of the Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency.
That goal will not be achieved easily. Taliban bases are scattered across North Waziristan from the Shawal Valley forests to clusters of remote farmhouses in the hills. A wide array of other militant groups also use the area, including the Afghan Taliban, the Punjab Taliban, Al Qaeda, the Haqqani network and others. Until recently, Haqqani network operatives have mingled freely in North Waziristan alongside Pakistani Taliban fighters and the plethora of other militant outfits that shelter there. Pakistan’s rejection of American demands for an operation in North Waziristan contributed to the escalation of the C.I.A. drone campaign, which has killed at least 2,300 people since 2008, according to groups that monitor the strikes.
The Pakistani airstrikes have so far been aimed at three groups: the Pakistani Taliban, led by Maulana Fazlullah; the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which played a central role in the Karachi airport attack; and the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, which is fighting against the Chinese government. The military has avoided striking other groups whose relationships with the military are more complicated. But the current offensive in North Waziristan seems not as much a response to American browbeating as to the growing certainty that the Taliban are a major threat to stability in Pakistan. The operation has broad public support for now. “Operation at last!” read Monday’s front-page headline in The Nation, a conservative English-language daily.
The Haqqani network, which carries out attacks in Afghanistan but not in Pakistan, was described in September 2011 as a “virtual arm” of Inter-Services Intelligence by Adm. Mike Mullen, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Haqqani network held Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl hostage in Afghanistan for five years before releasing him on May 31 in exchange for five Taliban prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay. Major political figures have also voiced support for the military’s move — including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who until recently wanted to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban, and his opposition rival, Imran Khan, a longtime critic of attacking the Taliban who nonetheless said on Monday that he was reluctantly supporting the operation.
Tensions between the United States and Pakistan over North Waziristan stem from the two countries’ clashing priorities. The United States wants all militants rooted out of the area, including Al Qaeda and the Haqqani network, to help an orderly withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan and to reduce threats against the West. Aside from the situation on the battlefield in Waziristan, analysts said, the question now is the strength of the Taliban riposte, and whether it will sway public opinion. “Most people think it’s good that this operation has started,” said Mr. Amir, the commentator. “But can we complement it with a broader antiterrorism policy across the country? That is the challenge for Pakistan.”
But the Pakistani military wants to maintain its ties with groups like the Haqqanis that may serve Pakistan’s strategic interests in Afghanistan, and to disarm only the militants who have been attacking Pakistani forces.
Relations between Pakistan and the United States nearly collapsed over a number of actions in 2011, including the American commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden, but they have gradually improved over the past 18 months.
The Pakistani military has not been immune to criticism over the new offensive.
Sirajul Haq, the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami, a religious party, said the military’s decision to attack was “disappointing” and warned that it would “deepen the national and political crisis.”
The army said it had made appropriate preparations for any refugees who flee the fighting. “Announcements will be made for local population to approach designated areas for their orderly and dignified evacuation,” it said in a statement.
American drone strikes against militants in Pakistan resumed last week after a hiatus of nearly six months, with two strikes on a farmhouse north of Miram Shah that Pakistani officials said was controlled by the Haqqani network.