PESHAWAR,
Pakistan
— War has come to Pakistan, not just as terrorist bombings, but as full-scale
battles, leaving Pakistanis angry and dismayed as the dead, wounded and
displaced turn up right on their doorstep.
An
estimated 250,000 people have now fled the helicopters, jets, artillery and
mortar fire of the Pakistani Army, and the assaults, intimidation and rough
justice of the Taliban
who have dug into Pakistan’s tribal areas.
About
20,000 people are so desperate that they have flooded over the border from the
Bajaur tribal area to seek safety in Afghanistan.
Many
others are crowding around this northwest Pakistani city, where staff members
from the United
Nations refugee agency are present at nearly a dozen camps.
No
reliable casualty figures are available. But the International Committee of the
Red Cross flew in a special surgical team from abroad last week to work
alongside Pakistani doctors and help treat the wounded in two hospitals, so
urgent has the need become.
“This
is now a war zone,” said Marco Succi, the spokesman for the International
Committee of the Red Cross.
Not
since Pakistan forged an alliance with the United States after 9/11 has the
Pakistani Army fought its own people on such a scale and at such close quarters
to a major city. After years of relative passivity, the army is now engaged in
heavy fighting with the militants on at least three fronts.
The
sudden engagement of the Pakistani Army comes after months in which the United
States has heaped criticism, behind the scenes and in public, on Pakistan for
not doing enough to take on the militants, and increasingly took action into
its own hands with drone strikes and even a raid by Special Operations forces
in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
But
the army campaign has also unfolded as the Taliban have encroached deeper into
Pakistan proper and carried out far bolder terrorist attacks, like the Marriott
Hotel bombing on Sept. 20, which have generated fears among the political,
business and diplomatic elite that the country is teetering.
Fighting on Three Fronts
In
early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the
Taliban and Al Qaeda
that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military,
Gen. Ashfaq
Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda
stronghold along the Afghan border.
Earlier
this summer, the military became locked in an uphill fight against the
militants in Swat, a more settled area of North-West Frontier Province that was
once a middle-class ski resort. Today it is a maelstrom of killing.
“Swat
is a place of hell,” said Wajid Ali Khan, a minister in the provincial
government who has taken refuge in Peshawar. Mr. Khan said he was so afraid
that he had not been to his house in Swat for a month.
At
a third front, south of Peshawar, around the town of Dera Adam Khel, the army
recently recaptured from Taliban control the strategic Kohat tunnel, a road
more than a mile long that carries NATO supplies from the port of Karachi to the
American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The
new president of Pakistan, Asif
Ali Zardari, spoke in New York during a visit to the United Nations General
Assembly, about how the fight against terrorism was Pakistan’s war,
not America’s.
But
even as the gruesome effects of the battles slam the national consciousness,
there has been scant effort to prepare the public for the impact of the
fighting. Public opinion has soured on Pakistan’s alliance with the United
States and has strongly opposed military campaigns that inflict heavy civilian
casualties.
Pakistani
law enforcement officials and residents of Bajaur and Swat say there have been
many civilian deaths, but so far, no agency or government body has offered an
estimate of those killed.
Hanging
in the balance in the fighting is the allegiance of the civilians who have seen
their homes wrecked, their cattle and crops abandoned, and their loved ones
killed and wounded.
Pakistani
Army commanders have said that in order to put down the Taliban, the government
must win the hearts and minds of the Bajaur tribesmen.
Losing Hearts and Minds
But
in interviews in the camps, and in villages around Peshawar where the displaced
are bunking with relatives, many of the people of Bajaur say they are fed up
with both sides of the conflict.
In
the Red Cross hospital ward, two young brothers, Haseen Ullah, 5, and Shakir
Ullah, 8, lay immobile on their hospital beds, their limbs tightly bound in
white bandages covering what Dr. Daniel Brechbuhler, a Red Cross surgeon, said
were shrapnel wounds.
The
father of the two wounded boys, Hajji Sher Zaman, a relatively well-to-do
used-car dealer in Bajaur, said he had no patience with the Taliban.
But
Mr. Zaman said he was furious with the government for not holding anyone
responsible for the killing and wounding of civilians.
“In
Bajaur, innocent people are being killed as infidels, the dead cattle are lying
on the road, the roads are tainted with the blood of the people who have been
killed,” he said. On return trips in recent weeks, he said, his village was
“full of the rotten smell of dead animals.”
“Why
not target the real people, the administration knows where they are,” Mr. Zaman
said.
In
another ward, Amin Baacha, 13, lay with only one arm, his right one had been
amputated. An army helicopter had circled his family’s pickup truck as they
were fleeing their village and fired on them, the boy said.
An Insurgent Sanctuary
At
a briefing at army headquarters in Rawalpindi on Monday, the military said it
believed that Fakir Mohammed, the leader of the Taliban in Bajaur, had taken
sanctuary in the neighboring Mohmand district. Another important commander, an
Afghan Taliban, Qari Ziaur Rehman, had moved back to Afghanistan, it said.
From
their side of the fighting in Bajaur, the Taliban have mounted a brutal show of
intimidation, aided by money and deep support from across the border in Afghanistan
and Mohmand, according to interviews with the displaced and with law
enforcement and military officials.
Recently,
the Taliban leader, Mr. Mohammed, stormed into a gathering of tribal leaders,
arriving in a convoy of 20 vehicles, said Habib-ur Rehman, a trader from Bajaur
who now lives in a camp for the displaced in Timergara in the district of Dir,
just outside Bajaur.
Mr.
Mohammed, who is described by the army as one of the most skilled Taliban
tacticians, told the tribesmen, “I’m here to get you to stop the meeting. If
you don’t stop, you will have a coffin over your heads,’ ” Mr. Rehman
recalled.
The
Taliban were well financed, some of the displaced tribesmen said.
In
Koz Cinari, in Mohmand, the Taliban gathered nightly with a fleet of up to 100
double-cabin pickup trucks, according to a resident of Koz Cinari who spoke on
the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The
vehicles were carefully caked in mud for camouflage against possible sightings
from government planes, with only a patch of clear glass in front for the
driver. The convoys then crossed into Bajaur with men and weapons, the resident
said.
Foreign
languages pierced the nighttime air as the vehicles were prepared, the resident
said.
According
to the military officials at the briefing on Monday, many of the Taliban
fighters come from Central Asia.
In
Swat, the Pakistani Army has been fighting the Taliban for more than two
months, and still the Taliban hold the upper hand, according to accounts from
people who have fled the area.
Reports
of Taliban terrorism are widespread.
In
one case, scores of Taliban fighters confronted Iqbal Ahmed Khan, the brother
of Waqar Khan, a member of the provincial assembly. The fighters ordered Mr.
Khan, who was with two of his sons, to choose the son he wanted killed, said
the president of the Awami National Party, Senator Asfandyar Wali.
After
Mr. Khan was humiliated into choosing one son, the Taliban killed both boys,
Mr. Khan and seven servants, Mr. Wali said.
On
Thursday a suicide bomber attacked Mr. Wali’s home, killing four people and
narrowly missing Mr. Wali, one of the best-known politicians in North-West
Frontier Province and a national figure.
Life in a Battle Zone
Many
residents of Swat say they are exasperated by the army-imposed round-the-clock
curfew that keeps them indoors listening to the scream of jets and the thud of
artillery.
To
increase the misery, the Taliban blew up the power grid last week, and when
protesters gathered in the main street of Mingora, the police fired on them,
killing six people.
More
than 140 girls schools have been destroyed by the Taliban in the last several
months.
In
a typical technique to raise funds, the militants ordered the shopkeepers in
the mall in the town of Matta to stop paying rent to the landlord and pay the
militants instead.
“There
is no light, no gas, no water, no food,” Mr. Khan said.
Despite
all the distress of the civilians, “only two Taliban commanders have been
killed,” he said. “The army has its strategy, but they don’t explain.”
The
one hope in the gloom of war, said civilians and law enforcement officials, has
been the formation of small private armies by tribal leaders, known in the
region as lashkars.
They
have traditionally served as a way of dealing with squabbles in Pakistan’s tribal
society, but are now being formed in some cases to stand up to the Taliban.
Forming Tribal Armies
In
Salarzai, in the northern corner of Bajaur, a local private army has attracted
several thousand anti-Taliban fighters, said Jalal-Uddin Khan, a tribal leader.
But
whether the fervor of the tribesmen and their ancient equipment can be a match
for the ideological zeal, modern weaponry and sophisticated tactics of the
Taliban is an open question.
In
other places, like Dir, just outside Bajaur, these private armies have pledged
to keep both the Pakistani Army and the Taliban from entering their territory.
“Where
the army comes, the Taliban come,” said Sher Bahadar Khan, a tribal leader from
Upper Dir. His community had organized a militia and persuaded the army not to
put up checkpoints. The army was of little comfort because when the Taliban
killed civilians, soldiers stood by as a “silent spectator,” he said.
Closer
to Peshawar, in the village of Shabqadar, where the Taliban have held sway for
months, the local police organized civilians to join them in a display of force
against the militants.
The
Taliban had terrorized women who did not wear the burqa, and killed men they
deemed as “pimps” and threw their bodies in the river.
The
police chief of North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, said he had
encouraged the new police chief in Shabqadar to organize a “popular movement.”
Last
week, about 500 people, led by the local police chief, marched toward a fort
controlled by the Taliban in Shabqadar, Mr. Khan said.
A
15-hour battle ensued, leaving nine Taliban fighters dead and 28 wounded, the
police chief said. On the government side, one man was killed, and five
wounded, he said.
In
revenge, the Taliban threatened to blow up Warsak Dam, the main water supply
for Peshawar. But Mr. Khan said he was not deterred. He would not back down. “I
told the governor: ‘Open many fronts. We are more than them.’ ”