Pakistan Taliban Crumbling!

[wulf42]

The Pakistani Army is taking key towns and areas from the Taliban....they should have

done this long ago! The Taliban need to be hunted and killed to the very last animal

is dead!

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/stor...ub=TopStoriesV2

[eyeball]

I wouldn't hold your breath just yet.

The Pakistani army’s new offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan, probably the country’s most significant move in the antiterrorism fight since 2001, has so far failed to convince locals that the state really is determined to wipe out the extremists it has patronized in the past and with whom it has repeatedly cut “peace” deals.

Tribesmen from the Mehsud clan now flooding out to escape the fighting tell of brutal subjugation by Taliban extremists and their al-Qaeda allies who run the area. But they do not yet believe that the army has genuinely turned against militants.

Pakistan is a long way from winning the “hearts and minds” of the people of South Waziristan, which it must do if it is to clear the area of Islamic extremists.

And the current offensive, launched Oct. 17, is not gaining any ground toward that goal: Refugees claim the homes of ordinary people are being destroyed and civilians are dying in an indiscriminate aerial bombardment.

Story

Perhaps it will be different this time but perhaps not, the indiscriminate bombing certainly suggests the latter at the moment. The thing that really stands out to me in this story is how despised the Taliban is by ordinary people in the region. It reinforces my sense that if left to their own devices, that is without the west or the west's support for local and often just as brutal regimes to use as an ongoing galvanizing event, the Taliban would perish if all they had were their own bent views to attract followers with. The real trouble however is...

Even the anti-Taliban militia, made up of the few Mehsuds willing to stand up to the extremists, are not sure whether to have faith in the army.

“The government has used the people like toilet paper, used them and thrown them away,” thundered the spiritual leader and founder of the anti-Taliban Mehsud militia, Maulvi Sher Mohammad, in an interview.

This government he's talking about is our ally and the Mehsud, like the Shia and Kurds of Iraq, and others have been assured one too many times that we're with them only to be abandoned at the last minute. Between things like this and indiscriminate arial bombardment is it really any wonder why so many go insane and are willing to turn themselves into bombs?

Many Mehsuds said they would support an operation if they thought it was real. Instead, some of them said that the country's army acts cyclically against the Taliban just to keep international aid flowing in.

“This fight is for American dollars. The government always has some deal with the Taliban. It is ordinary people who suffer,” said student Zahidullah Mehsud, who thought he was aged about 19, queuing at a registration centre for those displaced by the operation, in Dera Ismail Khan. “This is all an ISI game.”

And its obvious the west has rigged most of it in 'our' favour.