When 10 militants burst into Army headquarters in Pakistan in a dramatic bid to take military bigwigs hostage, it signaled a major escalation in the Taliban’s ongoing efforts to undermine Pakistan’s political and military establishment.
The fact that the operation flopped on the face of it doesn’t obscure one fact: it was daring and it has put Pakistan’s military on the defensive and showed how vulnerable it is and can be. And, indeed, it turns out that the militants’ demands were breath-taking indeed: according to Pakistan’s Daily Times, the militants were demanding the release of 100 terrorists:
The Taliban gunmen who took 42 people hostage at the General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi on Saturday were demanding the release of about 100 terrorists, Inter-Services Public Relations Director General Major General Athar Abbas said on Monday.
“Their target was to take senior officers of the GHQ hostage and make demands,” he told journalists. “The main demand was the release of terrorists including high-profile ones. It included over 100 names, from all the groups, all the terrorists across the board,” he added.
Earlier on Monday, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the raid. Abbas said the terrorists had planned the assault in South Waziristan. “The main training area for this operation was in South Waziristan,” he said, adding that intelligence agencies had intercepted Taliban leader Waliur Rehman’s telephone conversations in this regard.
According to reports, Pakistan is now stepping up its offensive against Islamic extremists in the country’s Waziristan region:
The West has pressed Pakistan to take concerted action in Waziristan, the heart of Pakistani jihadism, as well as a crucial refuge for Afghan insurgents and al-Qaeda, possibly including Osama bin Laden. There are an estimated 15,000 battle-hardened Pakistani Taliban holed up in South Waziristan, where the mountainous terrain favours guerrilla warfare. Pakistan has fought at least three military offensives in South Waziristan since 2004, each time having to retreat to leave the Taliban in control, suggesting that the new offensive is a gamble.
Gen. Abbas said authorities had gathered evidence that the general headquarters assault was planned in South Waziristan, including a telephone intercept where a Taliban commander based in that area was recorded speaking to an associate, asking him to “pray” for the success of the attack. He said the terrorists had planned to hold senior army officers hostage until their demands were met – at the top of the list was the release of 100 jailed extremists
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But the militants have issued a warning: more is yet to come:
The Taliban claimed responsibility on Monday for the weekend attack on army headquarters, and vowed to activate cells across the country for more attacks. Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq called AP and said the assault on GHQ was only the first in a planned wave of strikes intended to avenge the killing of Baitullah Mehsud. “This was our first small effort and a present to the Pakistani and US governments,” he said.
And there was another big attack today. The Christian Science Monitor:
More than 40 people were killed Monday in a suicide bombing aimed at a military convoy in Pakistan’s restive Swat Valley.
The fourth militant attack in eight days occurred in the town of Alpuri in Shangla district, an area the military had claimed was secured, and it’s being seen as the Taliban’s latest attempt to engage the Army on several fronts ahead of the Army’s planned ground offensive on the Taliban’s South Waziristan base.
It comes a day after the Army ended a 22-hour long hostage siege at their headquarters in Rawalpindi freeing around 40 military personnel and civilians. Three hostages, eleven military personnel, and eight militants were killed during the course of the siege, which ended shortly before dawn on Sunday, while one militant, believed to be the ring-leader, was captured alive.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the attack was evidence of an increasing threat to the authority of the Pakistani state.
Dr. Rifaat Hussain, a military analyst at the Quaid-e-Azam university in Islamabad says the two attacks are “related to the initial phase of the South Waziristan operation where the military are using airstrikes to soften their targets. The Taliban feel it’s in their interests to take on the security forces in as many theatres as possible to prevent the military from succeeding in South Waziristan just as they did in Swat.”
The Washington Post labels events in Pakistan a “deadly resurgence:”
At summer’s end, there were hints of optimism in the battle against Pakistan’s Islamist insurgents. The military said it had routed the Taliban from the verdant Swat Valley. A CIA missile had killed the Pakistani Taliban’s chief — so shaking the group, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials said, that his likely successor was killed in a duel for the top spot. Bombings slowed.
But that successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, is alive, a military spokesman said Monday. And as a spate of mass-casualty attacks during the past week has proven, so is the Taliban.
“They have been able to regroup, and they now feel confident to take on the Pakistani state in the cities,” said Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a professor and security analyst in Lahore. “They want to demonstrate that they have the initiative in their hands, rather than Pakistani authorities. So it’s a real kind of war.”
….The surge in attacks comes at a delicate time for Pakistan’s civilian government, which is struggling to contain a public relations fiasco over conditions placed by Congress on a massive U.S. aid package. The legislation granting the aid exhorts Pakistan to do more to control its armed forces and to fight Islamist extremists — stipulations that critics, including the military, view as micromanagement by the United States.
UPDATE: Suicide bombers in Pakistan start young — like 13 years old.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.