Pakistan grass roots resistance to Taliban

LA Times:

Members of the 40-day-old tribal militia in this Swat Valley village come in all shapes, from all walks of life.

Some struggle to fasten bandoleers around pot bellies; some haven't finished high school. They are doctors and teachers, wealthy landowners and dirt-poor wheat farmers.

Some make their way with Kalashnikov rifles slung over their shoulders, others with only a wooden stick in hand.

What unites them is the memory of the Taliban's brutality, a time when the militant organization took over Kanju and the rest of the Swat Valley. Taliban militants beheaded perceived enemies, flogged women and bombed school buildings.

With most of Swat back in the hands of the government after a military operation that drove the Taliban into hiding, thousands of Pakistanis in towns like Kanju have been banding together to form lashkars, or tribal militias, to help keep trouble from coming back.

Subhan Ali commands 4,000 men who form a lashkar that regularly combs Kanju's dilapidated buildings and surrounding countryside for fleeing Taliban fighters and their sympathizers.

"Most of us don't have weapons," said Ali, 35. "At the start of all this, the Taliban took away a lot of our guns. Then the army came and took more of our guns. Many just have batons, but even that they will use."

Lashkars, for centuries a tool for resolving tribal disputes, are supplying a modern-day grass-roots layer of security to manpower-strapped military and police forces. The militias have formed in regions skirting South Waziristan, where Pakistani troops have launched an all-out offensive to crush the Taliban. In Bannu, just outside South Waziristan, tribesmen formed a lashkar after Taliban militants kidnapped students and teachers while they were being bused home from a local college this summer.

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Note the NRA message in the story. Having weapons as a means of self defense is important to resistance to oppression.

What is also important about this story is that it shows how creating a favorable force to space ratio does not have to be by just the military or police. An armed people can provide the kind of attention that makes it difficult for the insurgents to operate without detection. That is the key to defeating them. If they cannot move freely, they cannot survive, much less win.