Talibanistan terror tribes of Pakistan

Stanley Kurtz:

Lord Curzon, Britain's viceroy of India and foreign secretary during the initial decades of the 20th century, once declared:

No patchwork scheme--and all our present recent schemes . . . are mere patchwork--will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steam-roller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine.

Nowadays, this region of what is today northwest Pakistan is variously called "Al Qaedastan," "Talibanistan" or, more properly, the "Islamic Emirate of Waziristan." Pakistan gave up South Waziristan to the Taliban in spring 2006, after taking heavy casualties in a failed four-year campaign to consolidate control of this fierce tribal region. By the fall, Pakistan had effectively abandoned North Waziristan. The nominal truce--actually closer to a surrender--was signed in a soccer stadium, beneath al Qaeda's black flag.

Having recovered the safe haven once denied them by America's invasion of Afghanistan, al Qaeda and the Taliban have gathered the diaspora of the world-wide Islamist revolution into Waziristan. Slipping to safety from Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden himself almost certainly escaped across its border. Now Muslim punjabis who fight the Indian army in Kashmir, Chechen opponents of Russia, and many more Islamist terror groups congregate, recuperate, train and confer in Waziristan. This past fall's terror plotters in Germany and Denmark allegedly trained in Waziristan, as did those who hoped to hijack trans-Atlantic planes leaving from Britain's Heathrow Airport in 2006. The crimson currents flowing across what Samuel Huntington once famously dubbed "Islam's bloody borders" now seem to emanate from Waziristan.

Slowly but surely, the Islamic Emirate's writ is pushing beyond Waziristan itself, to encompass other sections of Pakistan's mountainous tribal regions--thereby fueling the ongoing insurgency across the border in Afghanistan. With a third of Pakistanis in a recent poll expressing favorable views of al Qaeda, and 49% registering favorable opinions of local jihadi terror groups, the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan may yet conquer Pakistan. Fear of a widening Islamist rebellion in this nuclear-armed state was Gen. Pervez Musharraf's stated reason for the recent imposition of a state of emergency. And in fact Osama bin Laden publicly called for the overthrow of Mr. Musharraf's government this past September. It is for fear of provoking such a disastrous revolt that we have so far dared not loose the American military steamroller in Waziristan. When Lord Curzon hesitated to start up the British military machine, he was revolving in his mind the costs and consequences of the great 1857 Indian "Mutiny" and of an 1894 jihadist revolt in South Waziristan. Surely, Curzon would have appreciated our dilemma today.

Foreign journalists are now banned in Waziristan, and most local reporters have fled in fear for their lives. Because scholars have long neglected this famously inhospitable region, Waziristan remains a dark spot, and America remains proportionately ignorant of the forces we confront in the terror war. Yet an extraordinary if neglected window onto the inner workings of life in Waziristan does exist--a modern book, with deep roots in the area's colonial past.

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If our enemy in this area were content to just screw up the lives of the people living there the problem could be ignored. However, this enemy is a believer in Islamic supremacy who wants to spread his brand of religious bigotry around the world and is willing to engage in mass murder of non combatants to achieve that objective.

That means we can not allow him to prevail or spread his virulent rule. He must be defeated and destroyed. Pakistan has shown that it lacks the will and capacity to do that at this time. Our forbearance has not been rewarded with positive action to rid the area of enemy forces. Pakistan is going to have to lead follow or get out of the way, because destruction is the only remaining solution to the problem.