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 on their doorstep.
An estimated 250,000 people have fled the gunship 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 they have flooded over the border from the Bajur tribal area to seek safety in war-torn Afghanistan.
Many others are crowding around Peshawar, a city in the northwest, where staff members from the U.N. refugee agency are present at nearly a dozen camps.
The International Committee of the Red Cross flew in a special surgical team last week to work alongside Pakistani doctors and help treat the wounded in two hospitals, so urgent has the need become.
After years of relative passivity, the army is now engaged in heavy fighting with militants on at least three fronts.
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Developments
U.N. orders children out: The United Nations declared the Pakistani capital unsafe for the children of its international staff yesterday and ordered them out, putting Islamabad on a par with Kabul in Afghanistan and Somalia. Britain said Wednesday it was repatriating its diplomats' children. Pakistan has long been a non-family posting for U.S. diplomatic staff.
Pakistan wants nuclear pact: Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani yesterday demanded a civilian nuclear agreement with the United States after Washington signed a similar deal Wednesday with Pakistan's arch-rival, India.
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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 airstrikes by drones and even a raid by special operations forces in Pakistan's tribal areas.
The army campaign has also unfolded as the Taliban have encroached deeper into Pakistan proper and carried out far bolder terrorist attacks, such as the Marriott Hotel bombing last month, which have generated high anxiety among the political, business and diplomatic elite and a feeling that the country is teetering.
In early August, goaded by the U.S. 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 Bajur, a Taliban and al-Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border.
The military was already 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. 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 U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The new president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, spoke in New York during a visit to the U.N. General Assembly about how the fight against terrorism was Pakistan's war, not America's.
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 law enforcement officials and residents of Bajur and Swat say there have been many civilian deaths, but so far, no agency or government body has offered an estimate of those killed.
Pakistani army commanders have said that in order to put down the Taliban, the government must win the hearts and minds of the Bajur tribesmen.
Reports of Taliban terrorism in Swat are widespread.
In one case, scores of Taliban fighters confronted the brother of Waqar Khan, a member of the provincial assembly, who was with two of his sons. The fighters ordered Khan's brother, Iqbal Ahmed Khan, to choose the one he wanted killed, said Sen. Asfandyar Wali, president of the Awami National Party.
After being humiliated into choosing one son, the Taliban killed both boys, their father and seven servants, Wali said.
Yesterday, a suicide bomber blew himself up at Wali's home, killing four people and narrowly missing Wali, one of the best-known politicians in North-West Frontier Province and a national figure.
