The Pakistani Taliban

[sadoldgit]

They must be so proud of themselves. butchering a load of children.

[Marsdinho]

How anyone can carry out such a wickedly depraved atrocity is far beyond my comprehension, but......there are others who are equally as wicked....

 

http://www.salon.com/2011/08/12/pakistan_drones_children/

[sadoldgit]

I am not going to defend the drone policy but there is a difference between a remotely operated bomb missing its target and walking into a building and shooting a bunch of unarmed kids isn't there?

[Marsdinho]

Yes, definitely. 100% - I'm not condoning it in any way shape or form. The whole thing (war on terror) is a terrible terrible mess.

[sadoldgit]

Nearly 2015 and a large percentage of mankind still acts as if we are still cavemen. All evolution seems to have done is to allow us to kill each other more efficiently.

[pap]

I am not going to defend the drone policy but there is a difference between a remotely operated bomb missing its target and walking into a building and shooting a bunch of unarmed kids isn't there?

 

State sponsored terror isn't any less terrifying for the victims.

 

The drone collateral damage rate is around 95%. This event is an aberration that has rightly raised the heckles of decent people.

 

Drone strikes are business as usual.

[Window Cleaner]

State sponsored terror isn't any less terrifying for the victims.

 

The drone collateral damage rate is around 95%. This event is an aberration that has rightly raised the heckles of decent people.

 

Drone strikes are business as usual.

 

Do the Pakistanis operate drones then ? Not at all sure that they do. Anyway the Taliban and other fanatics will carry on until there is one vicious and unprecedented action against them, perhaps it's for very soon.

[Marsdinho]

Its not just errant ordnance though....

 

- "February 17, 2012 - Kunar Raid - Six civilians, including a woman and a child were killed in a night raid in Dewa Gul Valley, in the Chawki district of Kunar province"

- "March 11, 2012 – Kandahar massacre - At least 16 civilians, including women and children were killed after a 'rogue' US serviceman entered their homes and began to open fire in the Afghan province of Kandahar"

- "April 6, 2011 – British troops accidentally killed two Afghan women in a car accident and shot dead a civilian man when an angry crowd attempted to prevent them from leaving"

- "March 1, 2011 – U.S. helicopter gunners killed nine Afghan boys ages 7–13 who were collecting firewood. A tenth boy was injured in the attack

- "February 2011 – A probe by Afghan government investigators concluded that 65 civilians, including 50 women and children, were killed in a Nato operation in Kunar province. Nato disputed the claim but Obama apologized for the incident"

- "February 12, 2010 – 5 Afghan civilians including two pregnant women and a teenage girl were killed when US special forces raided a house in Khataba village, outside the city of Gardez where dozens of people had gathered at the home to celebrate the naming of a newborn baby. The U.S troops tried to cover-up evidence of the botched raid and admitted only month later that they had killed the civilians.

- "July 27, 2008 – Canadian troops opened fire on a vehicle that came too close to a Canadian convoy in Kandahar. A two-year-old girl and her four-year-old brother were killed and the father of the two children was wounded"

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)#Civilian_and_overall_casualties_.282012.29

[pap]

Do the Pakistanis operate drones then ? Not at all sure that they do. Anyway the Taliban and other fanatics will carry on until there is one vicious and unprecedented action against them, perhaps it's for very soon.

 

No, but Pakistani kids are being killed by drones on a regular basis.

 

I wonder, where do you get the idea that the Taleban are going to get destroyed?

 

We tried that, with the full conventional force of the world's most technologically advanced nation. If it didn't work then, it's unlikely to work now.

[Window Cleaner]

No, but Pakistani kids are being killed by drones on a regular basis.

 

I wonder, where do you get the idea that the Taleban are going to get destroyed?

 

We tried that, with the full conventional force of the world's most technologically advanced nation. If it didn't work then, it's unlikely to work now.

 

Perhaps "we" didn't try hard enough. In fact the Pakistanis do have some drones, not sure of their range or capability though

but in this case I don't think the Pakistani Army are going to take this lying down. In fact they may just do whatever it is that they want and tell the reticent politicians to get forked. They've been active in the tribal areas recently and it could be that the insurgents are getting rattled because their tame politicians aren't covering them any more.

[pap]

Perhaps "we" didn't try hard enough. In fact the Pakistanis do have some drones, not sure of their range or capability though

but in this case I don't think the Pakistani Army are going to take this lying down. In fact they may just do whatever it is that they want and tell the reticent politicians to get forked. They've been active in the tribal areas recently and it could be that the insurgents are getting rattled because their tame politicians aren't covering them any more.

 

We haven't learned from our mistakes. The Americans have been on the world stage for a century. They can look within that century and find numerous examples of what can go wrong you try to conquer another country. The Phillipine insurrection and the guerilla war against the Viet Cong are just two.

 

We know that you can't kill terrorists to death to solve terrorism.

 

Trying harder basically involves genocide or collective punishment, whichever works soonest. Collective punishment didn't work, so we're left with genocide. You sure you're ready for that level of "committment"?

[Window Cleaner]

We haven't learned from our mistakes. The Americans have been on the world stage for a century. They can look within that century and find numerous examples of what can go wrong you try to conquer another country. The Phillipine insurrection and the guerilla war against the Viet Cong are just two.

 

We know that you can't kill terrorists to death to solve terrorism.

 

Trying harder basically involves genocide or collective punishment, whichever works soonest. Collective punishment didn't work, so we're left with genocide. You sure you're ready for that level of "committment"?

 

I'm not in charge of the Pakistani Army though am I. There will be terrible reprisals for this, count on it.

[pap]

I'm not in charge of the Pakistani Army though am I. There will be terrible reprisals for this, count on it.

 

One can hope. I've never been entirely sure of where Pakistani loyalties lie. If there is one good thing to come from this horrendous attack, it will hopefully harden the resolve against the Taleban.

[Window Cleaner]

One can hope. I've never been entirely sure of where Pakistani loyalties lie. If there is one good thing to come from this horrendous attack, it will hopefully harden the resolve against the Taleban.

 

In fact they've been cracking down on the tribal zones and the Khyber pretty hard of late, Uncle Sam has even given them a

reward for their efforts. Opinion seems to be that the Taleban are rattled and desperate and that this reprisal may end in their total destruction.

[TopGun]

Just finished reading a good book about the Taliban by Jason Burt. Shows not all is as simple as western media makes out. Lots of different sub groups etc.

Edited 16 December, 2014 by TopGun

[Window Cleaner]

Just finished reading a good book about the Taliban by Jason Burt. Shows not all is as simple as western media makes out. Lots of different sub groups etc.

 

Who are apparently beginning to fight amongst themselves on occasions. Pakistani government blind eye turning (at best) was sort of binding them together, when the crack down in the tribal zones commenced infighting (over infiltration apparently) created rifts in the lute. Not my hypothesis I'm afraid, got it from a bloke who does Indo-Pakistan studies .

[sadoldgit]

Its not just errant ordnance though....

 

- "February 17, 2012 - Kunar Raid - Six civilians, including a woman and a child were killed in a night raid in Dewa Gul Valley, in the Chawki district of Kunar province"

- "March 11, 2012 – Kandahar massacre - At least 16 civilians, including women and children were killed after a 'rogue' US serviceman entered their homes and began to open fire in the Afghan province of Kandahar"

- "April 6, 2011 – British troops accidentally killed two Afghan women in a car accident and shot dead a civilian man when an angry crowd attempted to prevent them from leaving"

- "March 1, 2011 – U.S. helicopter gunners killed nine Afghan boys ages 7–13 who were collecting firewood. A tenth boy was injured in the attack

- "February 2011 – A probe by Afghan government investigators concluded that 65 civilians, including 50 women and children, were killed in a Nato operation in Kunar province. Nato disputed the claim but Obama apologized for the incident"

- "February 12, 2010 – 5 Afghan civilians including two pregnant women and a teenage girl were killed when US special forces raided a house in Khataba village, outside the city of Gardez where dozens of people had gathered at the home to celebrate the naming of a newborn baby. The U.S troops tried to cover-up evidence of the botched raid and admitted only month later that they had killed the civilians.

- "July 27, 2008 – Canadian troops opened fire on a vehicle that came too close to a Canadian convoy in Kandahar. A two-year-old girl and her four-year-old brother were killed and the father of the two children was wounded"

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present)#Civilian_and_overall_casualties_.282012.29

 

This makes uncomfortable reading and I would never try to justify these deaths. There is still a difference in planning a raid in cold blood that will massacre children.

[Viking Warrior]

Marsindinho those stats don't make good reading I agree but the Taliban have perpetrated far more hideous crimes both innocent civilians as well as coalition forces .

 

Trouble is you rarely hear about those . Check points are dangerous areas and service personnel and civilians have been killed when cars full of explosives have failed to stop

For example Two British soldiers shot dead in Afghanistan by a man wearing an Afghan police uniform have been named by the Ministry of Defence.

 

They were Lt Edward Drummond-Baxter and L/Cpl Siddhanta Kunwar, both of 1st Battalion The Royal Gurkha Rifles, attached to 40 Commando Royal Marines.

 

They were killed at a checkpoint while on patrol in the Nahr-e Saraj district of Helmand province on Tuesday.

 

It's very difficult to identify who is Taliban and who isn't over there

 

A very very sad day with all those innocent kids and their teachers being slaughtered

[Verbal]

Just finished reading a good book about the Taliban by Jason Burt. Shows not all is as simple as western media makes out. Lots of different sub groups etc.

 

I think his name is Jason Burke, who's spent a lot of time reporting from Pakistan. The Pakistan Taliban itself isn't really a lot of different groups - it's dominated by one clan and is a merger of essentially two groups. The Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, were the same people who shot Malala Yusufzai and her schoolfriend, and are the same people who bombed and/or demolished schools (especially girls' schools) in Malala's home region of Swat Valley.

 

I was in Swat a few weeks before it was overrun by the Pakistani Taliban in 2007 and the sharp rise in the political temperature - a real, overwhelming sense of fear - was unmissable on the streets. What actually happened was even worse than the worst of those fears, with ISIS-style murders and torture and destruction. Aside from the human cost, Swat Valley, which is in an important sense the birthplace of Buddhism, lost many stupas which I'd seen lining the tops of the lush hills and mountains, as well as the prince's former palace and a rather nice ski resort. Most of all, though, it lost all those schools.

 

So why do the Pakistani Taliban target schools and schoolchildren so regularly? The answer lies in government policy, manipulated by the Saudis. In the 1980s, the Pakistani military dictator Zia Al-Huq accepted billions of dollars to start a network of madrassas in the country. This was part of a process he called "Islamisation", but was actually more accurately described as "Wahhabification". The Saudis' aim was to create a Wahhabi hinterland across from the Arabian gulf, and Zia did their bidding - cutting investment in state (secular) schools and allowing the Saudis to pay for the madrassas.

 

Three decades later, now that the children from those 'schools' have graduated, Pakistanis are reaping the whirlwind. Remember: madrassas 'teach' one thing and one thing only: the literal word of the Koran, rote-learned in a language that Pakistani children do not even understand. So alongside the ability to recite the phonetic sounds, but minus the ability to understand anything at all, madrassa children are also spoon-fed Wahhabi conspiracy theories about the evils they must confront.

 

These evils are not even primarily the West. They are the 'wayward' practices of non-Wahhabi Islam or of any form of secularism - and teaching a child mathematics, or biology, is tantamount to a capital offence, both for the teacher and the child. This is why the sadists who attacked the school outside Peshawar reserved their most vicious attack for the headmistress, who was burned alive in front of her pupils.

 

The Pakistani Taliban could be wiped out with relative ease - they are not embedded with centuries of tradition but rather are just three decades old. They are unpopular among the populations they hide within. The only real sustenance they've received in the recent was from the ISI (Pakistani military intelligence). If only the three critical power blocs in Pakistani politics - the government, the army and the ISI - could agree a common plan, the Pakistani Taliban will be gone. Unless there is such a common plan, you can be sure that someone within the Pakistani power elites wants them to continue.

 

The longer term solution is to rebuild the state school structure and starve the madrassas of pupils. If only Western aid contributed to that, rather than weapons for a deeply corrupt and greedy military establishment, you'd see a huge difference. It sounds like bad taste to want something good to come out of such an appalling tragedy - but there is a chance that the Pakistani Taliban, who, as you'd expect from their schooling, are as thick as bricks, have just brought about their own downfall.

[badgerx16]

As long as the power hungry sociopathic criminals who head these 'terrorist' organisations can persuade gullible fools that blowing up 'infidels' and apostates will grant them an eternal place in Paradise, this will continue.

[Halo Stickman]

Verbal, you obviously have a lot of first-hand knowledge on these issues, and I, for one, would like to thank-you for taking the time to share it with this forum – very interesting stuff.

[sadoldgit]

Verbal, you obviously have a lot of first-hand knowledge on these issues, and I, for one, would like to thank-you for taking the time to share it with this forum – very interesting stuff.

 

Ditto, A very informative post.

[Verbal]

Verbal, you obviously have a lot of first-hand knowledge on these issues, and I, for one, would like to thank-you for taking the time to share it with this forum – very interesting stuff.

 

Thanks. The first-hand knowledge is actually rather more than I'd have wanted. In 2008, after another working trip to Karachi, a fixer working with me, a Hindu and a well known figure in Pakistani media circles, was kidnapped and held hostage for six months by this group. He was released when a large ransom was paid, but he returned, not surprisingly, in terrible condition.

 

Just to give a sense of how embedded the Pakistani Taliban are within certain parts of the military establishment, the kidnapping itself was carried out by a serving Pakistani army major.

[sadoldgit]

Good to see Homeland tackle this very issue at the moment.

[OldNick]

I think his name is Jason Burke, who's spent a lot of time reporting from Pakistan. The Pakistan Taliban itself isn't really a lot of different groups - it's dominated by one clan and is a merger of essentially two groups. The Pakistani Taliban, or TTP, were the same people who shot Malala Yusufzai and her schoolfriend, and are the same people who bombed and/or demolished schools (especially girls' schools) in Malala's home region of Swat Valley.

 

I was in Swat a few weeks before it was overrun by the Pakistani Taliban in 2007 and the sharp rise in the political temperature - a real, overwhelming sense of fear - was unmissable on the streets. What actually happened was even worse than the worst of those fears, with ISIS-style murders and torture and destruction. Aside from the human cost, Swat Valley, which is in an important sense the birthplace of Buddhism, lost many stupas which I'd seen lining the tops of the lush hills and mountains, as well as the prince's former palace and a rather nice ski resort. Most of all, though, it lost all those schools.

 

So why do the Pakistani Taliban target schools and schoolchildren so regularly? The answer lies in government policy, manipulated by the Saudis. In the 1980s, the Pakistani military dictator Zia Al-Huq accepted billions of dollars to start a network of madrassas in the country. This was part of a process he called "Islamisation", but was actually more accurately described as "Wahhabification". The Saudis' aim was to create a Wahhabi hinterland across from the Arabian gulf, and Zia did their bidding - cutting investment in state (secular) schools and allowing the Saudis to pay for the madrassas.

 

Three decades later, now that the children from those 'schools' have graduated, Pakistanis are reaping the whirlwind. Remember: madrassas 'teach' one thing and one thing only: the literal word of the Koran, rote-learned in a language that Pakistani children do not even understand. So alongside the ability to recite the phonetic sounds, but minus the ability to understand anything at all, madrassa children are also spoon-fed Wahhabi conspiracy theories about the evils they must confront.

 

These evils are not even primarily the West. They are the 'wayward' practices of non-Wahhabi Islam or of any form of secularism - and teaching a child mathematics, or biology, is tantamount to a capital offence, both for the teacher and the child. This is why the sadists who attacked the school outside Peshawar reserved their most vicious attack for the headmistress, who was burned alive in front of her pupils.

 

The Pakistani Taliban could be wiped out with relative ease - they are not embedded with centuries of tradition but rather are just three decades old. They are unpopular among the populations they hide within. The only real sustenance they've received in the recent was from the ISI (Pakistani military intelligence). If only the three critical power blocs in Pakistani politics - the government, the army and the ISI - could agree a common plan, the Pakistani Taliban will be gone. Unless there is such a common plan, you can be sure that someone within the Pakistani power elites wants them to continue.

 

The longer term solution is to rebuild the state school structure and starve the madrassas of pupils. If only Western aid contributed to that, rather than weapons for a deeply corrupt and greedy military establishment, you'd see a huge difference. It sounds like bad taste to want something good to come out of such an appalling tragedy - but there is a chance that the Pakistani Taliban, who, as you'd expect from their schooling, are as thick as bricks, have just brought about their own downfall.

this is what our Foreign Office should be reading, and every politician as well. People like yourself and Dubai (about Arab mind) give great insights.Thanks for that

[Viking Warrior]

Excellent Post Verbal and very informative

[Special K]

Verbal, you obviously have a lot of first-hand knowledge on these issues, and I, for one, would like to thank-you for taking the time to share it with this forum – very interesting stuff.

 

I'll second that, Verbal. In depth knowledge on situations like this is hard to come by. Thanks for sharing.

[aintforever]

Agree with the above, interesting insight Verbal.