Pakistan Army Digs In on Turf of the Taliban

From a forward base in the bare brown foothills of the soaring mountains of South Waziristan, Pakistani soldiers fired artillery at insurgents sheltering in scrub across the valley. Smoke blotted the sky as the soldiers set ablaze houses once used by the Taliban to hide caches of heavy weapons. In the Makeen bazaar, where the former leader of the Pakistani militants, Baitullah Mehsud, was once king, the army has flattened the jerry-built stores, including the ice cream parlor, scotching any idea of easy return. Here in the heartland of the Pakistani Taliban, the army has fought for five months to claw back territory from its indigenous enemy. A rare trip under military escort revealed that the battle had turned into a grinding test of wills with no neat resolution in sight. The Pakistani Army has, at least for the moment, gained the upper hand by taking the war to the Taliban in these barren mountains rather than retreating behind successive peace deals, as it once did. But it is not claiming victory. “The terrorists are nowhere and everywhere,” Lt. Col. Nisar Mughal said as he looked out on a landscape devoid of people, crops, animals or any sign of normal life. “This is a strange kind of warfare. We can’t say the area is completely sanitized. We are hunting them, killing them.” Mr. Mehsud and his men, allies of Al Qaeda, used this area over the past few years to attack Pakistani cities and military installations with a ferocious onslaught of suicide bombings and commando raids. Most have now fled to North Waziristan, or to other parts of the tribal areas and to Pakistan’s cities, leaving behind small bands of dedicated guerrillas. They continue to inflict casualties on the army with ambushes and sniper fire in a region where the British tried but failed to subdue the tribes during their colonial rule. The United States, a long-distance participant and a keen cheerleader in the current Pakistani campaign, killed Mr. Mehsud in a drone strike in August and appears to have killed his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, in another drone attack in January. But the suicide attacks continue, as evident in the bombings that killed more than 40 people in Lahore on Friday. Washington has sent extra artillery, helicopters, body armor, radio sets and evensurveillance drones to help Pakistan’s ground war. During a recent visit Secretary of StateHillary Rodham Clinton pledged $55 million to upgrade roads in the area. In return, the Obama administration would like the Pakistani military to pursue a full-scale offensive in North Waziristan against the Afghan Taliban, who use the area to launch operations against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and who serve as Pakistan’s proxies against Indian interests there. So far, the chief of the Pakistani army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, has made clear that India remains Pakistan’s prime enemy, despite the persistent insurgent threat, and that the army has its hands full with the South Waziristan campaign. It is a fight that his nuclear-armed military, which is trained for conventional warfare against Indian forces on the plains of Punjab, has been forced to adapt to in strange ways. At Nawazkot, a village just north of Makeen, Lt. Col. Yusuf Mehmood said one of his officers, trained in mountain climbing, scaled a 7,000-foot peak with ropes and crampons. The officer had 15 soldiers with him. “They managed to get above a group of about 300 militants, and then fired on them,” the colonel said. The militants scattered, he said. On a hill above Makeen, Colonel Mughal’s men hacked a trail with one bulldozer and six donkeys, used to carry weapons and ammunition. The trail was needed as the path for a new forward base overlooking Makeen, a series of small villages of flat-roofed mud compounds stretched out along a narrow valley. Each night, squads of soldiers, charged with fending off efforts by the militants to steal the lone bulldozer, guarded the precious machine. The trail took 45 days to build. “We are fighting within our means,” one major said wryly. Then the trail needed upkeep. Two army engineers, protected with their screen of 15 soldiers, scan the trail every morning for improvised explosive devices planted at night by the militants. Now that the snow has melted and pink flowers are blooming, lending a surprising softness to the harsh landscape of dry riverbeds and gravel tracks, the army says it will ask civilians who were ordered to leave last fall to return to their villages. The return of the people, many of them marooned in camps in North-West Frontier Province, will probably prove the hardest part of the operation. First, many militants are expected to drift back among the civilians. Second, the military will remain in South Waziristan for perhaps the next 18 months or so, the army says. But neither the army nor the national civilian government has done much preparation for fixing the broken system of indirect rule in the tribal areas that has failed over the last 60 years to deliver development. Much of the rebellion of the Pakistani Taliban was fueled by anger at the corruption of tribal leaders who pocketed government money intended for economic development, said a retired army officer, Murad Khan Mehsud, from the village of Nano, not far from Makeen. “I told General Kayani that half the teachers in my village are sitting in Dubai or Karachi, not in the schools,” Mr. Mehsud said. This was because under a time-honored practice in the tribal areas, teachers’ salaries were not paid to teachers, but to tribal leaders who in turn split the money between their relatives and a government bureaucrat, he said. Some residents have expressed hesitation about returning while the military remains. “We are being asked to go back, but we will only go back when the military leaves,” said Nasir Muhammad Mehsud, 18, an engineering student from the village of Khaisore, now living in Dera Ismail Khan, a city filled with the displaced from South Waziristan. If the military stays in South Waziristan, Mr. Mehsud said, Pakistani civilians will again be subject to attacks by the Taliban, who are not yet defeated. The soldiers, he said, will become targets of the militants, and the people will be caught in between. But most galling, Mr. Mehsud said, was the destruction of family property during the fighting, including 200 houses in his area. So far, there had been no offers of compensation for all that was lost, he said. Brig. Sarfraz Sattar, who leads the army operation in Makeen, acknowledged some of the difficulties of reform. But, he said, he remained upbeat. “The Mehsuds as a tribe did not support the Pakistani Taliban,” Brigadier Sattar said. “Baitullah Mehsud terrorized the people, slit the throats of the tribal leaders, and the people had to submit.” The army inflicted enough damage on the militants, he said, to make it hard for them to regain that kind of control.