Taliban attack Pakistan border outpost
Image via WikipediaEleven members of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps were killed and nine were wounded on Friday when about 150 militants launched simultaneous attacks on five security posts in the northwestern Mohmand tribal region close to the Afghan border, a senior security official said.The failure to properly respond to the warning was very costly and shows a lack of leadership at the filed level. The units should have had field fortifications to protect their troops and prearranged fields of fire to cut down the enemy and cut off his route of retreat.
The official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said that the security forces had received a tip about an impending assault, “but frankly, we didn’t expect an attack of this scale and magnitude.”
He said that 24 militants were killed in the clashes that went on for several hours but displayed the bodies of only eight militants to the local media. “Our assessment is based on militants’ intercepts and chatter,” the official said.
The simultaneous attacks, in the Baizai area close to the Afghan border, were the biggest since Pakistani forces launched operations in the lawless tribal regions along the border.
A government official said that militants in the Mohmand region, a mountainous, heavily forested area with easy escape routes to Afghanistan, have largely been confined to a small area that adjoins Pakistan’s Bajaur tribal area and Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar Province. The strategic location makes it relatively easy for militants to organize.
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Our special ops troops have been working with some of these units, but clearly more training is needed for some of them. Pakistan also needs to be more aggressive in going after these gangs and putting them on the defensive. They also need to coordinate with Afghan forces so they can better cut off the avenues of retreat.
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