Barbarians Inside the Gates

The Taliban engage in barbaric practices, and the news coming out of the frontier provinces and nearby provinces fully inside Pakistan are truly horrific. The Taliban are misogynists, and they treat women worse than chattel. They slaughter people on a whim, and even those Muslims who initially welcomed these thugs with open arms are horrified at what has resulted.

When Taliban fighters first entered Karim's village last month, he recounted, they said they had come to bring peace and Islamic law, or sharia, to Swat. But the next day, two of the fighters dragged a policeman out of his truck and tried to slit his throat. Horrified, a crowd rushed over, shouting and trying to shield the officer. The fighters let him go, but the incident confirmed the villagers' worst suspicions.

"We all said to each other, what sort of people have come here? And what kind of sharia is this? Cutting off people's heads has nothing to do with Islam," recounted Karim, 55, a bus driver. "The people were filled with great rage, and great fear."

Authorities in North-West Frontier Province said that with the conflict intensifying, they expect half a million people to flee the once-bucolic Swat region near the Afghan border, much of which is now occupied by heavily armed militants. Officials announced Tuesday that they plan to open six refugee camps in the safer nearby districts of Swabi and Mardan, but until then, many who leave home to escape the violence are facing the arduous task of finding their own shelter.

The reports also show just how reluctant the Zardari government is in engaging in a proper offensive against the Taliban. They're not sending the regular army against the Taliban, but rather the paramilitary forces, which have gotten bloodied on a regular basis and who have regularly lost ground against the Taliban, who are asserting dominion over Swat and nearby provinces outside the frontier.

The Pakistani government claims that they are busy killing Taliban as they find them in Swat, but the reports are grim. Taliban are patrolling large areas of Swat and have pushed deep inside Pakistan proper.

Reports from Swat are confused as the military claims that they've killed dozens of Taliban, including suicide bombers, while other reports suggest that they were civilians attempting to flee.

It's an absolute mess, and it shows no signs of improving. The cause for all this misery; years of doing nothing to stop the Taliban from laying the groundwork in the Frontier Provinces and inside Pakistan proper that would seek to usurp power from the Pakistani government and traditional power brokers. The government in Islamabad, including Musharraf and Zardari, regularly engaged in crackdowns and appeasement, which offered the Taliban the insight they needed to simply outlast any sustained effort to stop the Taliban.

Each deal that the Pakistani government cut was one deal more that the Taliban would break knowing that another deal would be forthcoming. Each successive deal would further erode Islamabad's position, and the refusal to send the military to crush the Taliban has repercussions throughout the region.

The Obama Administration is engaging in wishful thinking if it believes that the Pakistani government and the Afghan government are going to crack down and crush the Taliban, even with US assistance. The Pakistanis lack the political will to do so, which means that no matter how much the US or Afghan governments pledge to do so, the safe havens in the frontier provinces will be off limits. It will take the Pakistanis to do what must be done, and their reluctance has brought the region to the precipice.