Alarm Grows Over Pakistan’s Failure to Halt Militant Gains

With 400 to 500 Taliban fighters newly in control of a strategically important district just 70 miles from here, Pakistani authorities have deployed only a poorly paid and equipped constabulary force — numbering just several hundred — to the area.

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The Taliban appeared to be consolidating control in the district, Buner, on Thursday after moving in and establishing checkpoints on Wednesday. Residents said Taliban militants held a meeting, or jirga, with local elders and the local administration on Thursday. The residents said the meeting yielded a truce similar to the one reached with local leaders in the Swat Valley, which resulted in the agreement by the government of President Asif Ali Zardari to allow the imposition of Islamic law there 10 days ago.

“This concession represents a serious development and reflects both the growing strength of the Pakistani Taliban and the inability of the Pakistani army to conduct successful counterinsurgency operations,” said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who just returned from his fifth visit to Pakistan.

The fall of Buner has raised new international alarm about the ability of the Pakistani government to fend off an unrelenting Taliban advance from the Swat Valley, where as part of the truce agreement, the Pakistani Army remains in its barracks. The Taliban have moved to within a few hours’ drive of Islamabad, the capital of this country, and the neighboring garrison city of Rawalpindi.

The Pakistani military does not have a presence in Buner, Pakistani and Western officials said. From the hills of the district, the Taliban have access to the flatlands of the district of Swabi, which lead directly to the four-lane highway that connects Islamabad and Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, where much of the Pakistani Taliban operate.

On Thursday, four platoons of the paramilitary police constabulary force moved into Buner (pronounced boon-AIR), which is home to about a million people and is a gateway to another major Pakistani city, Mardan. Four platoons had arrived Wednesday.

Each platoon has about 40 officers. They face Taliban militants armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Intimidated by the militants, the local police have retreated into their stations, residents said. At least one constabulary officer had been killed and another seriously wounded already, the police said Thursday.

"The news over the past several days is very disturbing," Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters. "The administration is extremely concerned."

Reflecting the deep concerns of the Obama administration, the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, was in Islamabad for the second time in two weeks to meet with Pakistan’s top military and intelligence commanders.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has been underlining the alarm over the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. On Wednesday she told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the deterioration of security in nuclear-armed Pakistan “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world.”

On Thursday, she said referring to the country’s nuclear arsenal: “You know, we spend a lot of time worrying about Iran — Pakistan already has them. And they are widely dispersed in the country.”

On Thursday morning, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, called Mr. Zardari, “to get his personal judgment and hear what his strategy is,” Mr. Holbrooke said. He did not disclose what the answer was.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, visiting Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C., who are preparing to deploy to Afghanistan, also urged Pakistan’s leaders to act swiftly to a profound danger.

“My hope is that there will be an increasing recognition on the part of the Pakistani government that the Taliban in Pakistan are in fact an existential threat to the democratic government of that country,” Mr. Gates said. “I think that some of the leaders certainly understand that. But it is important that they not only recognize it, but take the appropriate actions to deal with it.”

At the Pentagon, several senior uniformed and civilian officials also expressed worry.

One senior Defense Department official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on policy matters, called the deployment of the constabulary force “a cosmetic effort.”

A senior counter-terrorism official called the fast-moving Taliban operations "frightening."

The Taliban told the local Buner leaders that they would not interfere with nongovernmental organizations or government installations, nor openly display their weapons. Negotiations would be used to sort out friction with local residents, and there would be forgiveness for those who killed Taliban fighters in earlier combat
Representatives of Mualana Sufi Mohammed, the Taliban leader who brokered the peace deal in Swat, were present at the meeting, the results of which will be announced at a public rally on Sunday, according to a resident in Daggar, Buner’s main city.

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Post a Comment »Read All Comments (322) »Last year when the militants encroached into Buner, killing policemen, the local people fought back and forced the militants out. But now, with a beachhead in neighboring Swat and a number of training camps for fresh recruits, the Taliban was able to carry out what amounted to an invasion. A local politician, Jamsher Khan, said by telephone: “We felt stronger as long as we thought the government was with us, but when the government showed weakness, we too stopped offering resistance to the Taliban.”

The advance had been building for weeks, with the assistance of sympathizers and even a local government official who was appointed on the recommendation of the militants, a senior law enforcement official said. But Buner’s final capitulation was rapid.

On Wednesday, officials and residents said that heavily armed Taliban militants had begun patrolling villages and that the local police had retreated to their station houses in much of the district. Staff members of local nongovernmental organizations had been ordered to leave, and their offices were looted, residents said. Pakistani television news channels showed Taliban fighters triumphantly carrying office equipment out of the offices of the organizations.

The militants were patrolling the bazaar in Daggar, residents said. Women, who used to move freely around the bazaars, were scarcely to be seen, they said. Those who did venture out were totally covered.

“They are everywhere,” one resident of Daggar said by telephone. “There is no resistance.”

A Western official who was familiar with the Pakistani military said that, on Wednesday, one of the highest-ranking Pakistani army officers traveled from Islamabad to Peshawar and met with the officers of the 11th Corps, the army division based in Peshawar, to discuss the “overall situation in Buner.”

One of the big attractions of Buner for people from all over Pakistan, the shrine of the Sufi saint Pir Baba, was now in the control of the militants, the senior law enforcement official said.

Last year, the villagers around the shrine kept the Taliban at bay when the militants threatened to take it over.

But in the last 10 days, the Taliban closed the shrine and said it was strictly off limits to women, the senior official said. The militants are now patrolling it.

Taliban control in Buner came swiftly in the last few days, officials said.

The militants were helped by the actions of the commissioner of Malakand, Javed Mohammad, who is also the senior official in Swat and who was appointed on the recommendation of the Taliban, the senior law enforcement official said.

The Taliban began their assault on Buner in early April, when a battalion of the Taliban militia with heavy weaponry crossed over the hills from Swat to Buner, according to an account in the newspaper Dawn that appeared on Saturday.

The Taliban then captured three policemen and two civilians, and killed them, the newspaper said.

Infuriated by the killings, people in lower Buner and Sultanwas assembled a volunteer force and killed 17 Taliban fighters, the account said.

But soon after that, Mr. Mohammad tried to persuade the local elders to allow the Taliban to enter Buner, the newspaper said.

Soon afterward, Mr. Mohammad ordered the local armies to dissolve, the senior law enforcement official said. The order led many of those who had been willing to stand up to the Taliban to either flee or give up, the official said. Among those who are reported to have fled is Fateh Khan, a wealthy Buner businessman. Mr. Khan had been one of the main organizers and financiers of the private armies in Buner.

In a show of strength, the militants held a feast in the home of a local Taliban sympathizer two weeks ago, and since then have fanned out into the district, the senior official said. Pakistani television news reports indicated Thursday that Taliban militants were also crossing into Shandla, another district bordering Buner and Swat.