Pakistanis Mired in Brutal Battle to Oust Taliban
LOE SAM, Pakistan — When Pakistan’s army retook this strategic stronghold from the Taliban last month, it discovered how deeply Islamic militants had encroached on — and literally dug into — Pakistani territory.
Behind mud-walled family compounds in the Bajaur area, a vital corridor to Afghanistan through Pakistan’s tribal belt, Taliban insurgents created a network of tunnels to store arms and move about undetected.
Some tunnels stretched for more than half a mile and were equipped with ventilation systems so that fighters could withstand a long siege. In some places, it took barrages of 500-pound bombs to break the tunnels apart.
“These were not for ordinary battle,” said Gen. Tariq Khan, the commander of the Pakistan Frontier Corps, who led the army’s campaign against the Taliban in the area.
After three months of sometimes fierce fighting, the Pakistani Army controls a small slice of Bajaur. But what was initially portrayed as a paramilitary action to restore order in the area has become the most sustained military campaign by the Pakistani Army against the Taliban and its backers in Al Qaeda since Pakistan allied itself with the United States in 2001.
President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to make the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan a top priority. The Bajaur campaign serves as a cautionary tale of the formidable challenge that even a full-scale military effort faces in flushing the Taliban and Al Qaeda from rugged northern Pakistan.
Pakistani officials describe the area as the keystone of an arc of militancy that stretches across the semiautonomous tribal region of Pakistan and into Afghanistan.
Under heavy pressure from the United States, Pakistani officials are vowing to dislodge the Taliban fighters and their Qaeda allies who have taken refuge in the tribal areas.
But a two-day visit to Loe Sam and Khar, the capital of Bajaur, arranged for foreign journalists by the Pakistani military, suggested that Pakistan had underestimated a battle-hardened opponent fighting tenaciously to protect its mountainous stronghold.
Taliban militants remain entrenched in many areas. Even along the road to Loe Sam, which the army laboriously cleared, sniper fire from militants continues.
The Pakistanis have also resorted to scorched-earth tactics to push the Taliban out, an approach that risks pushing more of their own citizens into the Taliban’s embrace.
After the Frontier Corps failed to dislodge the Taliban from Loe Sam in early August, the army sent in 2,400 troops in early September to take on a Taliban force that has drawn militants from across the tribal region, as well as a flow of fighters from Afghanistan.
Like all Pakistani soldiers, the troops sent here had been trained and indoctrinated to fight in conventional warfare against India, considered the nation’s permanent enemy, but had barely been trained in counterinsurgency strategy and tactics.
A Heap of Rubble
To save Loe Sam, the army has destroyed it.
The shops and homes of the 7,000 people who lived here are a heap of gray rubble, blown to bits by the army. Scraps of bedding and broken electric fans lie strewn in the dirt.
As Pakistani Army helicopters and artillery fired at militants’ strongholds in the region, about 200,000 people fled to tent camps for the displaced in Pakistan, to relatives’ homes or across the border into Afghanistan.
The aerial bombardment was necessary, Pakistani military officials say, to root out a well-armed Taliban force.
The Pakistani Army and the Frontier Corps, the paramilitary force responsible for security in the tribal areas, say 83 of their soldiers have died and 300 have been wounded since early August. That compares with 61 dead among forces of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan in the first four months of 2008.
At some point, probably over a period of several years, though no official could explain exactly when, the militants dug the series of well-engineered, interconnected tunnels.
The military now believes such tunnels lace much of Bajaur, where the militants still control large swaths of territory, General Khan said in an interview at his headquarters in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province.
Bajaur is no ordinary prize. The militants seized it because of its strategic location beside Kunar Province in Afghanistan, where American and coalition forces are fighting the Taliban.
The area serves as a gateway to Kunar for Taliban fighters from other parts of the tribal belt, particularly Waziristan, to attack American forces.
Bajaur provides access south to Peshawar, one of the nation’s major cities, which is under threat from the Taliban.
And it offers a land bridge to more settled parts of Pakistan, like the Swat Valley to the east, where the army is struggling to contain the Taliban.
The fight is now a test of strength between the army and Tehrik-i-Taliban, the umbrella group of the Pakistani Taliban, allied with Al Qaeda, General Khan said.
The army will fight until it has captured all of Bajaur, he said.
Arabs, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Afghans form the hard core of its opponents, enlisting young, unemployed local men who join the militants for money and the prestige of sitting armed with a rifle in a double-cabin pickup, the favored Taliban vehicle, General Khan said.
American officials have said they believe some important Qaeda leaders are hiding in Bajaur.
In 2006, a United States missile attack from a remotely piloted aircraft on the village of Damadola was aimed at killing the top deputy to Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri.
Villagers in the Mohmand tribal agency, adjacent to Bajaur, said that they saw Mr. Zawahri in the northern part of Mohmand in September and that he had arrived with his wife to inspect a house, stayed the night, then left in a convoy of vehicles.
Advance of the Taliban
It was in response to the 2006 strike that the Taliban started taking over Bajaur, according to the government’s senior civilian official in the area, Shafirullah Khan.
Its methods were ruthless. Homeowners were coerced or paid to allow the militants to use their premises as bases, Mr. Khan said. Those who resisted were killed, often by beheading.
A well-known Afghan Taliban fighter, Zia ur-Rehman, directed and fortified the operation with his own men, bringing hundreds of fighters from Afghanistan last November, Mr. Khan said.
By last December, the Taliban had pushed government-armed local tribesmen, known as levees, out of their checkpoint at Loe Sam. By June, the Taliban had destroyed more than half of the 72 checkpoints in Bajaur.
The Taliban disrupted the workings of the civilian government, staging a suicide bombing of a truck carrying the salaries for teachers, and robbing a major bank, Mr. Khan said.
In August, as Pakistan’s resolve to take on the insurgents hardened, the army dispatched Maj. Ijaz Hussain and nearly 150 Frontier Corps troops to recapture the strategic junction of Loe Sam.
They had little idea what they were in for. With scarce ammunition and little water in fierce heat, they fought the Taliban in close combat but were quickly surrounded.
Two convoys sent to rescue them were decimated by militants, who attacked from their tunnels.
Ordered to retreat, the corpsmen escaped under cover of night through cornfields in sloshing rain, evading Taliban pursuers and gunfire from government helicopters.
In the failed recapture attempt, 29 Frontier Corps soldiers were killed and others were severely wounded, Col. Shahbaz Rasul of the Frontier Corps said.
Panic spread. A few days later, the crenellated fortress walls of the government compound in Khar were in danger of being overrun. More than 300 of the levees protecting the compound fled, leaving 35, Mr. Khan said.
“One of the basic problems of our fighting system is the intelligence failures,” said General Khan, the Frontier Corps commander. “Aggressive patrolling should have been done. It wasn’t done.”
Interviews with Pakistani Army officers, and a ride under army escort along the road from Khar to Loe Sam, showed that many of the soldiers seemed to be unprepared to fight a fast-moving, highly motivated and well-disguised insurgent force.
General Khan and other Pakistani military officials complained that they did not have the proper weapons and equipment to take on the militants, including radar and current intelligence.
The Taliban fighters, meanwhile, had heavy weapons and communications systems that could disguise their whereabouts, as well as the ability to home in on army radios.
Lt. Col. Javed Baluch, whose troops were sent to Bajaur in early September, said that even the terrain had surprised them. The khaki-colored earth dips and swerves every 25 yards; crevices suddenly become hillocks, and scattered clumps of trees and bushes can conceal snipers.
The militants were king, because the civilians had been ordered out of the area by the army in early August, in anticipation of the fight.
“The enemy had a lot of advantage,” Colonel Baluch said. “They knew the area completely. We were told we would meet foreign fighters and local fighters supporting them. The resistance unfolded differently.”
His mission was to clear Taang Khatta, a place thick with militants. It was a spot where the Frontier Corps forces had faced stiff resistance in August.
On the first day that his soldiers advanced on foot along the road to Taang Khatta, they were ambushed, he said.
The insurgents were invisible, hidden behind the thick mud walls of the compounds, their rifles poking through narrow slits.
“Small arms have no effect on the walls, and that’s what we were carrying,” Colonel Baluch said. “We did not know where to fire back.”
The attack came from three directions, but the guerrillas made a mistake.
“When they shouted, ‘God is great,’ it was helpful to us,” Colonel Baluch said. The voices gave away their location.
In the end, it took five days and the loss of four men to conquer Taang Khatta, a mere bend in the road, just about a mile from the Khar headquarters.
Still, Colonel Baluch was lucky, he said. The push to capture another tiny place, Nisarabad, farther up the road, left 12 soldiers dead and 46 wounded.
The final assault on Loe Sam was led by Maj. Anwar Saeed, 37, who was experienced in fighting the Taliban in North Waziristan, the base of the most hardened militant fighters in the tribal belt.
It was ultimately captured on Oct. 21, and reduced to ruins in the process.
“When you capture a compound, the adjacent one becomes a firefight,” he said. “They were fighting and firing, and throwing grenades at us from 25 meters away.”
Yes, he knew the people who had lived here were now bereft. “I know many have suffered because of our actions,” Major Saeed said. “But the government is going to take care of them.”
What Lies Ahead
In Peshawar, however, some of the store owners from Loe Sam whose property was crushed said there were limits to their understanding.
They had heard no word about their return or about reconstruction, said Hajji Shakir, the owner of two stores in Loe Sam, as he sat on the floor of a crowded house with a group of fellow merchants, clutching the account books that he had escaped with.
“If the government doesn’t rebuild, we will be thieves, suicide bombers,” he said. “We will be forced to do these things.”
Mr. Khan, the chief government representative in Bajaur, said he had funds, provided by the United States Agency for International Development, for rebuilding. But he did not know when it would begin.
Some of the displaced said they were also angered by the high number of civilian deaths, many of them incurred when Pakistani jet fighters and helicopter gunships attacked Taliban redoubts.
The military said last week that 95 civilians had been killed in the Bajaur conflict, but the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that the number seemed low.
There is no reliable count, because the commission was barred from investigating.
Similarly, there is little agreement about how many militants the army has killed in the three months of the Bajaur campaign.
The army says 1,500. But two officers, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were contradicting their superiors, said that the number appeared excessive. One army captain involved in the fighting said 300 seemed closer.
While the resistance had been reduced on the flat land, one thing was certain: as the military prepares to fight the militants in the mountainous areas in Bajaur, progress will be more difficult.
In his wood-paneled office, Col. Nauman Saeed, the officer in charge of day-to-day operations at the headquarters in Khar, said he was mired in a classic guerrilla conflict.
In September, he said, Taliban leaders in Bajaur had replenished their forces with 950 more men from Afghanistan.
“You keep killing them,” Colonel Saeed said, “but you still have them around.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/world/asia/11pstan.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&oref=slogin
950 crossed in Pakistan under the nose of US of A? If the US of A cant control Afghanistan's side of the border with all that high tech equipment then how can she expect Pakistan?
Or maybe US of A is collaborating in slipping these terrorists in Pakistan so that the tensions continue and US of A always have this excuse to stay in Afghanistan.
US Rogue commanders? :shudder
