Tribes revolt against Pakistan Taliban

NY Times:

On a rainy Friday evening in early August, six Taliban fighters attacked a police post in a village in Buner, a quiet farming valley just outside Pakistan’s lawless tribal region.

The militants tied up eight policemen and lay them on the floor, and according to local accounts, the youngest member of the gang, a 14-year-old, shot the captives on orders from his boss. The fighters stole uniforms and weapons and fled into the mountains.

Almost instantly, the people of Buner, armed with rifles, daggers and pistols, formed a posse, and after five days they cornered and killed their quarry. A video made on a cellphone showed the six militants lying in the dirt, blood oozing from their wounds.

The stand at Buner has entered the lore of Pakistan’s war against the militants as a dramatic example of ordinary citizens’ determination to draw a line against the militants.

But it says as much about the shortcomings of Pakistan’s increasingly overwhelmed police forces and the pell-mell nature of the efforts to stop the militants, who week by week seem to seep deeper into Pakistan from their tribal strongholds.

Since the events in Buner, the inspector general of the police in the North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, has encouraged citizens in other towns and villages in his realm to form posses of their own.

The hope is that determination itself will deter Taliban encroachment, building on the August victory with one phalanx after another of committed citizens.

But the strategy is also a sign of his desperation.

...

The local police chief in the Buner district, Zubair Shah, a rising star of the Pakistani police force, acknowledged the challenges of confronting a Taliban threat that is more deeply ensconced in communities all over Pakistan than had been thought.

He is trying to tamp down the Taliban with a police force that is grossly underpaid and frequently overmatched by better armed militants. Currently, the police officers in Buner earn about one-quarter the monthly salary that the Taliban are offering, Mr. Shah said.

Moreover, given that the police have become a primary target of the militants, it is hardly surprising that morale has plummeted. “The people are more motivated than the police,” he said.

In the tribal areas to the west of the Buner district, the Pakistani Army is now encouraging tribal militias, known as lashkars, as a backup force against the Taliban. Such militias have a long tradition in tribal society.

...

What this tells me is that these people are ripe for a counterinsurgency strategy that incorporates them into the community defense as a local militia. This is one of the things that special forces troops do really well and Pakistan is making a big mistake to reject their assistance. These people are fully capable of acting as the sons of Iraq did in breaking the al Qaeda hold over local communities. What these people need is organization assistance and financial support to go along with a military backup. They can be the first line of defense in a village.

I have never seen a rational explanation of why Pakistan refuses assistance from the US on projects like this.