Apr 08 2007

Are al Qaeda Being Pushed From Pakistan?

Published by at 8:20 am under All General Discussions,Pakistan

Seems like the fighting between the local tribes and foreign fighters in Pakistan’s Waziristan Province has resulted in the clearing out of some areas now open to Pakistan government forces:

he Pakistan army moved into a known stronghold of foreign Al-Qaeda militants near the Afghan border after a tribal militia battled the militants this week, residents and officials said yesterday.

Ethnic Pashtun tribesmen in the South Waziristan region vowed last month to expel the foreign jihadists, most of them Uzbeks, from their lands. More than 200 foreigners and up to 50 tribal fighters have been killed in clashes since then, government officials say.

Pakistani troops were deployed on Friday evening in mountainous Shin Warsak, about 10km west of South Waziristan’s main town of Wana.

The actions in Waziristan have most people in the West scratching their heads, wondering why Taliban sympathizers would turn on al Qaeda enclaves. But it is clear that al Qaeda has brought the Taliban nothing but sorrow and are a fairly violent and dictatorial lot towards their neighbors. It is not hard to envision why people in Afghanistan and Iraq are tiring of the death their al Qaeda neighbors bring.

When seen in tandem with recent US investments and agreements with Pakistan to beef up border security it would seem the trend in this region is towards stability. These are elements of multi-pronged efforts that include investments and turn the people from violence towards building.

Akram said the objective of Pakistan’s comprehensive strategy to promote peace and progress in the country’s frontier regions was to win over the local population and to isolate the militants.

In this regard, he wrote that last September’s agreement with the tribal elders of North Wazirisitan was essentially an exchange of peace for development, and, contrary to some Afghan assertions, there was no proven link between that accord and the rise of violent incidents in Afghanistan.

“Winning the hearts and minds of the people is even more important than killing or capturing insurgents,” he stressed in his article, captioned ‘A United Front against the Taliban’. “Military tactics that cause collateral civilian casualties and damage property may kill 10 terrorists, but they will create 100 more”.

This transition towards reconciliation and rebuilding is the necessary part of any war. We rebuilt Europe and Japan after we decimated them so as to ensure they would rise out of the ashes an ally and not a future potential enemy. The more we see of this kind of shift from military power to investment the closer we are to a plateau of stabilty and peace. We will need to achieve a series of these in all the areas Islamo Fascism still garners support for their violent strain of Islam, but success will breed more success.

This article lays out the challenge in the area as Uzbeks and other ethnic groups have set up various competing Islamo Fascist enclaves:

t is believed that the Uzbeks militants in the tribal areas belong to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the aim of which is to establish an Islamic state in the Central Asian Republics, Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are being commanded by Tahir Yaldushove, an Uzbek, who is living in exile and who keeps moving between North and South Waziristan.

There are around 10 mobile terrorist groups in the Central Asian Republics. The two strongest militant organisations are the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, known to be the most extremist group, and the Hizbut Tahrir (HT) – a softer version of the IMU. Tahir Yaldushev and Juma Namangani first formed the Adolat Party in Uzbekistan. When that was banned they moved to Chechnya and finally to Afghanistan, where they formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in 1998.

The aim of the IMU and HT is to get rid of their present rulers and establish an Islamic regime in the whole of Central Asia including Afghanistan.

While a big challenge, it seems progress is being made and locals are on the side of that progress. It may be this kind of approach will be expanded to Iraq and Afghanistan to further isolate and remove the pockets of Islamo Fascism. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out. But clearly some elements of this are working when you have locals willing to go to great lengths to remove foreign fighters from the midsts..

2 responses so far

2 Responses to “Are al Qaeda Being Pushed From Pakistan?”

  1. Dc says:

    Something is definitely up with this. I read somewhere..it might have been an indian news sourced document from Pakistan…something about this where it was mentioned that the local tribal leader suggested that the Uzbecks were agents of, or had been helping, the US, Jews /Israel, etc…and that’s why they were being expelled. Their religious interpretations and ideology is no different than the harsh, murderous one that AlQueda follows. They are very closely aligned in that regard. Every other report I saw on this…showed the local tribal leader (I forget his name), that this was to expell “AlQueda” foriegners.

    I think news sources are using the term Uzbek and Alqueda interchangabely and should probably refrain from doing that in this regard to get a more accurate picture of what is going on. The Uzbechs are being ejected from Pakistan….not AlQueda…is a more accurate description.

    It could have been triggered by them asking the Uzbechs to disband their obvious training base and they gave them the finger. Or it could be, as one report I saw suggested that was contrary to all western reports…that someone has fingered the Uzbecks as the primary source of intelligence assets for the west and Israel in the region. The Uzbechs were selling information about other extremists in the region to western buyers for their own profit. Or it could have been for some other reason…like the Uzbecks obvious large base in the region was drawing unwanted heat on some HVTs who are still in the region. I think there’s more to this story than has been reported.

  2. BarbaraS says:

    Where are the drones to take these militant training bases out? If there is fighting going on with the locals then the Pakistani government must know where these training bases are. You would even think our satellites would pick them up.

    If the locals think the Uzbeks are agents of the west then the hatred for the west is still so rampant that very likely it will never be stamped out. It is amazing that they hate us so much when we certainly never did anything to these wild regions of Pakistan. Even the government of Pakistan up until recently had no control over this area. How can we ever hope to change their attitudes about us? Probably never. But then isn’t this the attitude all the countries of the world have about us? This brings to the forefront that no good deed goes unpunished. We should never have tried to save the world because that world turned on us. You would think they wanted to destroy us right up until the time that they need us to protect them. They denegate and thwart us at every turn up to that time.