Disparate militants bands in Pakistan are increasing coordination in their insurgency while the authorities who should be challenging their spread are demoralised and fearful, security analysts say.
Militants have battled security forces in several parts of the north-west in recent weeks and briefly seized a main road tunnel 50 km (30 miles) from Peshawar city in late January.
Suicide bombers have killed hundreds of people over the past year, striking in all of the country's main cities and killing opposition leader Benazir Bhutto on December 27.
The attacks have raised fears about the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan. While there's no chance of the insurgents defeating the army or holding territory outside remote enclaves on the Afghan border, the violence looks set to intensify.
Retired Brigadier Mahmood Shah, a former chief of security in the ethnic Pashtun border lands, said peace deals with the militants in their border hub of Waziristan had backfired.
"Unfortunately, the policies of the last few years have helped them in re-establishing themselves, in reorganising and rearming" Shah told Reuters in Peshawar. "That's why it is difficult to turn things around."
The local militants are inspired by the Afghan Taliban and draw many of their fighters from the disenchanted youth of the ethnic Pashtun tribes.
Tribal factions have been joined by Muslim sectarian militants and foreign fighters and many from central Asia. The militants are also allied with al Qaeda.
Shah said the militants have been doing most of the fighting though he saw the hand of al Qaeda behind some of the sophisticated suicide bomb attacks on the security forces and on opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, killed on December 27.
A militant's chief, Baitullah Mehsud, who the government and the US CIA says was behind Benazir Bhutto's murder, was in December declared leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or Movement of militants, a faction umbrella group.
The organisation is for now little more than a name but more coordination would spell trouble, analysts said. "The Tehrik-i-Taliban is 95 percent theory and 5 percent tangible," said a senior government official who has worked in the tribal areas.
"They don't have a concrete, organised mechanism but things are moving towards that and that would be very dangerous," said the official, who declined to be identified.
The army can clear militants from areas such as the tunnel near Peshawar or the Swat Valley in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) but if administrators did not move in and provide for the people, the insurgency would never be stamped out.
"You can only convert the sympathies of the public from these guerrillas by providing what the government should be providing: justice, security, clean hospitals," said the official. "This is not complicated. There's no other solution".
Resentment runs deep in the seven isolated, long-neglected tribal agencies. "The government has nothing for the tribal people but troops, missiles and Cobra helicopters," said Abdul Karim Mehsud, a lawyer from South Waziristan.
Out of control. But while decisive government action was called for, authorities were fearful, especially after Benazir Bhutto's assassination, which had damaged Pakistan's body politic, Shah said. "They're scared of coming out," he said. Former Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said he expected violence to intensify before a February 18 general election. Attacks on the police had demoralised them while investigators were failing to catch anyone behind the suicide bombs, he said.
Comments
Comments are closed.