PESHAWAR, Pakistan – The government agreed to impose Islamic law and suspend a military offensive across much of northwest Pakistan on Monday in concessions aimed at pacifying the Taliban insurgency spreading from the border region to the country's interior.
The announcement came as three missiles believed fired from a U.S. drone aircraft destroyed a house used by a local Taliban commander elsewhere in the northwest, killing 30 people, witnesses said.
The cease-fire, in Pakistan's Swat Valley hundreds of miles from the missile strike in Kurram, will likely concern the United States, which has warned Pakistan that such peace agreements allow al-Qaida and Taliban militants operating near the Afghan border time to rearm and regroup...
...Amir Haider Khan Hoti, the chief minister for the North West Frontier Province, said authorities would impose Islamic law in Malakand region, which includes the Swat Valley. Swat is a one-time tourist haven in the northwest where extremists have gained sway through brutal tactics including beheading residents, burning girls schools and attacking security forces.
(Much more at link)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090216/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistanThe Taliban are among the worst people on Earth. I endorse any attempt by Obama to fulfill our promise to reconstruct Afghanistan for the Afghan people. However, we cannot help Afghanistan so long as the Taliban marauds the countryside destroying schools and equipment, and the Taliban will continue to exist and exist in strength so long as they are protected like this by the Pakistani government. It is much like Vietnam: we can extend the war and the reconstruction effort eternally, we can launch bombing raids at targets of opportunity across the border, but we can never win, for we are fighting an eternally defensive (in the strategic sense) guerrilla war against an enemy that will never, ever give up of its own volition. Guerrilla wars can only be won through full, multi-spectrum, benevolent, and expanding control of the territory in which the enemy makes its base; so long as a North Vietnam or a Pakistan exists relatively unmolested, the war in South Vietnam or Afghanistan cannot be won.
Just as Bush's foreign policy was judged primarily by his war in Iraq, I think Obama's will be judged in large part by how he handles the inherited problem of Afghanistan. As much as I am in favor of winning the Afghan war, if Pakistan continues to refuse to govern its border regions (or, worse, continues to legitimize Taliban presence in those regions), the war is nothing more than an expensive attempt to delay the inevitable, and I cannot support such an action.
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