PAKISTAN:PAKISTAN'S NEW government launched its first military operation against Islamists at the weekend, moving against warlords who were threatening to overrun the city of Peshawar.
A paramilitary force took on militants based in the Khyber tribal area, just west of Peshawar, the provincial capital of North West Frontier province, which borders Afghanistan. Troops blew up the home and other bases of one warlord, Mangal Bagh, around the town of Bara, in the Khyber agency, and uncovered a jail and torture chamber, according to officials. They also fired artillery shells at targets on nearby hilltops.
For the first time in months, the paramilitary Frontier Corps moved out of its forts in Khyber to patrol the streets in armoured personnel carriers and Jeeps, to establish the writ of the state.
Claiming success, the top official at the federal interior ministry, Rehman Malik, said: "I want to tell the people of Peshawar, sleep easy tonight. We are awake."
The action, however, only came after repeated pleas from provincial officials and police for a response to the militants' increasingly brazen incursions into Peshawar and other cities in North West Frontier province.
Peshawar, a city of three million, is now surrounded on three sides by the Taliban and other Islamist groups. Habibullah Khan, the bureaucrat in charge of the tribal belt, known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, said: "They [the militants] had come to think that, no matter what they do, the state will not challenge [them] . . . There were public floggings and private jails within a stone's throw of Peshawar."
Locals in Bara denounced the operation, insisting Bagh had brought law and order to an area which, when under government control, was notorious for smuggled goods, drugs and kidnappings.
Bagh's Lashkar-e-Islam movement, the main target of the military so far, is not allied with the Taliban and has not adopted its tactics of suicide bombings and attacks on the army.
But he has gained control of much of the Khyber area, which includes the Khyber Pass, a crucial supply line for Nato troops in Afghanistan. - (Guardian service)