Pakistan Taking Time to Clear, Hold, Build

Focusing on "hold", Pakistan is pacing themselves before tackling North Waziristan.

Opening up a new front in North Waziristan now, Pakistani military officials say, could undo the gains achieved in areas like Swat by diverting troops from areas they must continue to control. As one officer said, "To hold the ground, you have to be on the ground." The heavy security footprint, the Pakistanis argue, is aimed at avoiding the U.S. military's experience in Iraq, where some areas like Mosul north of Baghdad, once cleared, saw troops draw down only to have militants return and necessitate the re-insertion of American forces to clear them out again.
Indeed, the Pakistanis say, while they have largely cleared militants from Swat, which is in the North-West Frontier Province, as well as the South Waziristan and Bajaur areas along the Afghan border, the army remains engaged in battles in the Khyber district not far from Swat and nearby Orakzai, where the army claims almost daily double-digit Taliban kill figures (numbers that cannot be independently verified).
The Pakistanis also argue that there's more to holding an area than just boots on the ground. As part of its counterinsurgency strategy, the Pakistani military says it is taking the lead in eliminating the factors that helped the area fall to the extremists in the first place: poverty and bureacractic ineptitude and corruption. In Swat, it has set up joint civilian-military liaison cells, which bring together representatives of the military, provincial government and tribal elders. "There are so many reasons that we fell to them [the Taliban] and they took over, so many reasons," says Bakhd Zada, a tribal elder from Devlai, a town of some 30,000, 13 miles from Mingora in the Swat district. "There's poverty, lack of knowledge, and we were misguided," he says. "We need to educate the people and we need job creation. You know when you are empty minded and you have nothing to do, that is a place for demons to develop."
Lieutenant Colonel Akhtar Abbas, army spokesman in Swat, says the military is taking its cue from the populace. "We listened to them, we tried to solve their problems," he says. "They're our own brothers and sisters, we're not like the Americans in Iraq."

By: Brant