Taliban violate Pak truce
Telegraph:
Taliban militias in Pakistan have set up offices, introduced taxes and taken control of justice in the tribal agency of North Waziristan, where last month the government signed a peace agreement with militants.It will be interesting to see how long Pakistan can pretend that this deal is working. Pakistan is either going to have to get to work and destroy the Taliban or the job will be done for them by NATO forces working out of Afghanistan.
In violation of the agreement, a Taliban shura, or council, distributed pamphlets of its policies at the weekend, while militants have begun to patrol the area's streets and have already killed numerous "American spies".
A "tax schedule" detailed how businesses are liable to pay charges to the Taliban. Trucks entering the agency will pay for a six-month pass and petrol-pump owners will have to make contributions to the council. The taxes were described as a "donation" in the pamphlet.
The deal signed by the government on Sept 5 stipulated that al-Qa'eda fighters were to be expelled from North Waziristan and pro-Taliban militants were not to run a "parallel administration" or take part in fighting against coalition forces across the border. In return, Pakistani forces, who had been fighting local militants over the summer, withdrew from combat. The army retained the right to launch strikes in the area if militants do not adhere to the deal.
It was later discovered by Pakistani journalists that the deal was signed with wanted militants and not with tribal elders, as was officially claimed. Pakistani officials hoped the deal would empower tribal elders to control militants in their region but an estimated 120 of them have been murdered in the past year.
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Pakistan will never, never, defeat the Taliban. They don't even want to. In fact there's evidence that they're providing support to the Taliban.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, the Taliban is simply not defeatable by military force alone. The Taliban doesn't exist to fight as an Army, they exist to better their own people, as twisted and bigoted as their world-view may be. The Taliban is a very complex organization that actually offers some benefits to its people that NATO and the US would never be able (or willing) to provide an alternative to.
The sooner the US realizes this isn't a bad guy/good guy battle, the better. Even if we could exterminate all of the Taliban, peace and prosperity wouldn't just blossom in their place. The alternative to the the Taliban (Karzai and his regional warlords), are horrible, corrupt, murderous despots. Again, this is not a conflict with 'good guys' and 'bad guys'.
Due to decades of colonialism, imperialism and civil war, Afghanistan is a truly messed up country that will require decades of delicate evolution. Tragically, this fact of reality doesn't fit well into the Hawks' impatient and confrontational way of dealing with America's problems.