Author: Press Trust of India
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: July 25, 2006
Pakistan army has failed to rein in radicals
in the country's restive tribal belt and Islamic clerics throughout the region
continue to give 'jehadi' sermons asking people to live by the Islamic Sharia.
In Wana, the capital of the south Waziristan
tribal agency, extremists recently used dynamite to blow up a radio station
for playing music.
If these radicals sound like Pakistan's equivalent
of the Taliban regime, the Newsweek magazine says in a report, they are. The
tribal militants call themselves "Pakistani Taliban," or members
of a newly-coined and loosely knit entity, the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan.
They openly recruit young men who run their
own Islamic courts that, on occasion, stage public executions. The police,
the report says, simply stay out of the way.
The Pakistani army has had some success. It
killed 180 foreign fighters and captured some 300 foreign-born militants,
including al-Qaeda operatives, in periodic fighting, military spokesman Major
General Shaukat Sultan told the magazine.
Not only are the Pakistani militants now stronger
than ever, the links between the pro-Taliban, ethnic Pashtun tribes in Pakistan
and the Afghan Taliban across the border, who are also Pashtuns, have been
strengthened, Newsweek says.
The resurgence of the Afghan Taliban, who
last week briefly captured two district towns in southern Afghanistan, has
only increased the morale and muscle of their Pakistani brethren, the report
adds.
