Daud Khattak is managing editor of RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal.
The words "this is a critical time for Pakistan" have been used so often since the country gained independence in 1947 that it has become virtually meaningless. Practically every ruler and ruling party in the country’s history has used it, usually as a prelude to the intervention of the military in political life.
As his neighbors work to salvage what possessions they can from their ruined homes, Gul Shirin sits in silence amid 13 freshly dug graves. The 80-year-old Swat Valley resident has lost nearly his entire family to the floods that continue to ravage Pakistan.
Already reeling from a range of crises, Pakistan is now coping with the most devastating floods in the last 80 years. And the receding waters are exposing long-standing political, ethnic, and religious divisions at a time when the federation needs unity more than ever before.
The Pakistani government is straining to respond to the massive humanitarian crisis unleashed by the worst flooding in the country in 80 years. An estimated 12 million people have been affected. With the government's resources stretched to their breaking point, people in the country's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, one of the areas hardest hit, find themselves largely on their own.
Although the government has announced it is stepping up relief efforts for the devastating floods that hit the northwest, it has been widely criticized for its slow and poorly coordinated response. This perceived failure has opened new vistas for pro-Taliban religio-political parties and outlawed militant organizations to win the hearts and minds of locals in this war-weary region.
The death toll from flash floods and landslides triggered by torrential monsoon rains in northern Pakistan has risen to nearly 400 over the past three days.
Radio Mashaal's Daud Khattak says that since 2001, the Wazir and Mehsud tribesmen of the South and North Waziristan tribal agencies have been virtually enslaved by Al-Qaeda and their Taliban supporters, on the one hand, and the security forces and the state political administration, on the other.
After a suicide bombing at the start of the year killed more than 100 people playing and watching a volleyball game in Shah Hassan Khel, a tiny village in northwestern Pakistan, residents appear more emboldened than ever to resist the Taliban.
The Pakistani military’s scattershot security operations over the last eight years have not produced results because they have not been backed by a serious political strategy of development projects in the cleared districts.
Although army security operations are under way in almost all Pakistan’s tribal areas and some of them have even been declared cleared of armed Taliban, there is no reason for average Pakistanis to believe the onslaught of radicalism that started with the dollar-fuelled anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s will end soon.
A militant group that once only threw hand grenades at places of worship has now acquired so much influence, manpower, resources, and technical expertise that it can launch large-scale attacks, despite the efforts of intelligence agencies, the police, and the Pakistan Army.
Why did these three men have their hands amputated? Under what law and after what legal process? And what does this say about the government’s authority in Orakzai, one of Pakistan’s seven tribal agencies?
RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal broadcaster Daud Khattak says terrified and war-weary locals in the region have ever reason to wonder if the fighting will ever end.
Pakistan's top army commander has apologized for the deaths of over 60 civilians in an air strike in a remote tribal region. The gesture is commendable, but does little to stem the growing anger against the military and the government.
