Is Pakistan Losing Ground in Its Taliban War?

By Omar Waraich / Rawalpindi
TIME

For Pakistan's military commanders, it was a brutal warning that the gains they had made against militants over the past two years risk erosion. On Christmas Day, Pakistan's first female suicide bomber killed 47 refugees near a World Food Program (WFP) distribution point in Bajaur, the northernmost of Pakistan's seven tribal areas along the Afghan border. The WFP operations were forced to shut down. On Wednesday, Bajaur was hit again, as militants carried out their 100th bombing of a school in the area.

Also this month, militants in the neighboring Mohmand tribal area, immediately south of Bajaur, mounted some of their most audacious strikes. On Christmas eve, 150 militants carried out coordinated attacks on five security checkpoints there, killing 11 Pakistani paramilitaries. A fortnight earlier, two suicide bombers hit the local administrator's office, slaying 44 Mohmand tribesmen who had formed an anti-Taliban militia. Over 100 others were wounded. (See TIME's video of the fight against the Taliban in Marjah.)

The recent surge in militants attacks has sparked concerns about the stability of those tribal areas Pakistan had long declared secure. As the government seeks to consolidate its offensives against the Pakistani Taliban in their former strongholds in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan, the country's military can ill-afford distractions elsewhere. But the violence also serves to illuminate differences between the Pakistani and US forces, with both sides complaining about a porous border while they seem to be pursuing diverging priorities.

Since launching its offensive in Bajaur two years ago, Pakistan has prematurely made a series of triumphalist statements. As far back as February 2009, Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan, at that time the head of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, said: "In the middle of next month, we should secure Bajaur." Three winters later, most of the refugees who fled the fighting remain huddled in camps outside Peshawar. The spike in violence is unlikely to lure them back any time soon. (See photos of a Pakistani refugee camp.)

(More here.)

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