Daud Khattak is a senior editor for RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal.
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.
