MIRAN SHAH: Clean, safe and secure. These are the hallmarks of Pakistani tribal border regions, after the end of the two-year campaign to clear North Waziristan’s provincial capital from groups such as the Pakistani Taliban and Haqqani network, reported by The Washington Times.
The fighting had become so intense that Pakistan’s military, at the onset of the operation, evacuated thousands of civilians into “temporarily displaced persons” camps elsewhere within the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan — known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
From high atop Sarbanki Fort, one of several Pakistani army outposts manned by units from the “Golden Arrows” 7th Division, Brig Gen Jawad proudly pointed out for a small group of visiting reporters the burgeoning skyline of markets, schools, homes and businesses that cover a wide swath of Miran Shah’s new city centre.
In the two years since the official end of the North Waziristan operation, Islamabad says life has slowly returned to Miran Shah and the surrounding provinces, despite continuing complaints from the Trump administration and the Afghan government that Pakistan is not going enough to root out extremist groups that use the border regions as a sanctuary, training base and launching pad for attacks inside Afghanistan.
One fresh sign of progress: Pakistan on March 10 announced the reopening of a key Ghulam Khan border post between the North Waziristan tribal region and Afghanistan, allowing for trade convoys to pass. The crossing was closed for three years after government forces launched a major operation against the Pakistani Taliban and foreign militants in the area.
At a low point in Islamabad-Washington relations, President Trump singled out Pakistan as a problem last summer in his revised battle plan for Afghanistan.
Gen Joseph L Votel, head of Central Command, which oversees the South Asian theatre, and Gen John Nicholson, who commands the 14,000-plus US troops stationed in Afghanistan, recently called out Pakistan from what the Pentagon said was an insufficient effort in dealing with terrorist groups on its soil.
“Having sanctuary in Pakistan or having support from other actors in the region certainly is an aspect of the Taliban’s success here,” Gen Votel told a March 14 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in Washington. “I cannot tell you that we have seen decisive changes in the areas in which we’re working, but I remain very well-engaged with my [Pakistani] partner to ensure that we are moving forward on this.”
Gen Azhar said his country’s contributions and sufferings from the global war on terror, some with roots in the US-backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s, have been consistently overlooked by Washington and other foreign critics. Over 800 Pakistani soldiers died and 3,500 were wounded in the operation to flush out extremist groups from their redoubts in North Waziristan, he said.
In a thinly veiled shot at the American-led efforts to battle the Afghan Taliban, Gen Azhar said his forces were able in two years to subdue the de facto center of the Haqqani network, a brutal Afghan militant group headed by warlord Sirajuddin Haqqani, while the US-backed Afghan forces could not do the same across the border. Pakistan accomplished this without alienating the local population, which is critical to winning a guerrilla struggle.
“We do [counterterrorism] across the board,” said Maj Gen Nadeem Ahmed Anjum, inspector general for Pakistan’s Frontier Corps for Balochistan province, citing the more than 2,500 counterterrorism operations his units have executed in the past year.
“We do not discriminate between Haqqani [Network], Tehrik-e-Taliban — the Pakistani Taliban faction — and Lashkar-e-Taiba,” the terrorist group responsible for the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, he said during an interview at his headquarters in Quetta.
But sceptics say military operations have targeted select terrorist groups and jihadi groups that do not happen to be Pakistani proxies.
“Pakistan has to put on a good show” given the international pressures it faces, said Bill Roggio, senior fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The Kurram Agency is a largely Pashtun tribal area on the northern border that is the closest part of the country to the Afghan capital of Kabul.
Several American drone strikes have reportedly targeted top Haqqani leaders in Kurram Agency.
In Islamabad, Maj Gen Asif Ghafoor, director general for the Inter-Services Public Relations, acknowledged that Pakistani intelligence and the CIA had exchanged information that led to “intelligence-based operations” in the tribal areas.
