The Waziri Taliban Light The Night

There’s new fighting in Waziristan, with claims that upwards of 150 Taliban have been killed. Al-Jazeera is reporting the heavy use of jet bombing, which, combined with a massive civilian exodus, makes me doubt just how many militants have been killed (though word of 200 Pakistani troops being seized without shots fired stretches my credulity beyond my normal skepticism). In a particularly rich bit of irony, Major-General Waheed Arshad, a spokesman for the Pakistani Army, is complaining that the militants there are getting arms and support from across the border in Afghanistan.

And the militants in Afghanistan, who sneak back into the FATA when they tire of getting slaughtered by better trained NATO soldiers? Well, they get their weapons from… well probably not Iran, I can say that much. Do they appear by magic? Or might Arshad be wary of criticizing the militants’ primary supplier—ISI?

Péter Marton is right that sloppy reporting of this stuff has come to bug me so deeply. But he points to what appears to be excellent analysis from the Hassan Abbas at the Jamestown Foundation. I’ll let his summary of the region’s “Talibanization” stand, as it’s a good one, though I am still left wondering what, exactly, is going on there. We all seem to know things are getting worse; however the best we have are vague portents of some looming disaster. However, recent experience has taught me that neither the local chiefs, nor the Pakistani army, are reliable sources for what conflict is actually happened, neither are fleeing civilians. The severe hostility toward any outsiders, but especially western reporters, makes me unwilling to speculate anything about the fighting beyond recognizing it is probably happening. I can’t say if it would be significant.

All of this bears a depressing similarity to Afghanistan’s snowballing radicalization in the mid-90s. Roger LeMoyne said of Kabul in 1996, “The geography and hardware of conflict seemed less real than the suffering it left behind,” as if these conflicts were only comprehensible in the past tense. I truly hope that isn’t the case; knowing about them in the present, and hopefully future tense, makes it that tiny bit more likely we might be able to either prevent or stop whatever atrocities are on their way. Because if Abbas and Marton are correct, and this fighting is another symptom of the region’s growing radicalism, there is little but atrocity in the future—whether from zealous fundamentalists brutalizing the weak or female, or the Pakistani Army trying to prove its friendship to the West by bombing some villages.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.