Taliban threaten more war crimes in Pakistan

NY Times:

The Pakistani Taliban have taken dozens of hostages, including police officers, paramilitary fighters and even state bank officials, and threatened on Friday to begin killing them unless the government released four of their comrades captured last week.

The standoff has grown into one of the most serious recent challenges to the government’s resolve to curb the militants’ rapid expansion. The threat comes just 10 days before Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani is scheduled to meet with President Bush at the White House.

So far, the government has held firm, sending hundreds of soldiers to the area, Hangu, in North-West Frontier Province, to engage in the first real fighting with the militants since the two sides agreed to a new series of peace deals this year.

The fighting has resumed as the government faces mounting pressure from the United States to take stronger action against Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, which the militants use as launching pads for attacks against NATO and American troops in southern Afghanistan.

The news media in Pakistan have been abuzz about suggestions in Washington that the United States might act directly in the tribal areas to stop the flow of Taliban fighters into Afghanistan. Most Pakistanis would strongly oppose such a move as a violation of sovereignty.

But the militants have increasingly extended their presence into more settled areas of Pakistan, like Hangu, where the provincial police arrested about half a dozen armed Taliban fighters riding in a pickup truck last Saturday.

In revenge, other Taliban members kidnapped a variety of officials and are holding them in an undisclosed place. The Taliban said they had 49 hostages; the government said there were 29.

The militants’ response was so ferocious because one of the Taliban arrested, to the surprise of the police, was a man known as Rafiuddin, a lieutenant of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, according to the inspector general of the provincial police, Naveed Khan.

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This is one of those stories that highlights the media double standard. If a government such as the US or Pakistan made similar threats, the lead of the story would be about the threatened war crime of murdering prisoners. Instead this story treats these crimes as some sort of moral dilemma for the government.

It is one of the reasons why these actions are seen as a media plus by the terrorist. Their is no moral outrage at their conduct. It makes the media complicit in an enemy information op. Since the Geneva Conventions are pretty specific on the point why can't the media remind the reader of the violations?

Instead they treat the Conventions as some sort of unilateral contract binding only on the US and its allies which must be obeyed so the enemy want do exactly what they are doing in this case. It shows the hollowness of that argument.