The Rise of Pakistan's Taliban

Iraq is a lost case, now Afghanistan too...and our "ally" Pakistan is not helping either...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13990130/site/newsweek/from/RS.2/

By Ron Moreau and Zahid Hussain
Newsweek International
July 31, 2006 issue - Just over three years ago, under pressure from Washington to stop Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from crossing the porous border into Afghanistan, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf began dispatching tens of thousands of Pakistani troops to the country's tribal regions. The goal: to beat back the Islamic radicals in and around the seven tribal agencies bordering on eastern and southern Afghanistan. Today some 80,000 Pakistani troops are stationed in outposts and garrisons along the rugged frontier.

But, ironically, instead of quelling extremism, the military occupation has fueled it. Radical Islamic clerics throughout Pakistan's semiautonomous tribal belt now preach the hard-line gospel, day and night. Their fiery jihadist sermons exhort people to live by the harsh code of Islamic Sharia—or else. In Wana, the capital of the South Waziristan tribal agency, extremists recently used dynamite to blow up a radio station for playing music. If these radicals sound like Pakistan's equivalent of Mullah Mohammed Omar's ousted Taliban regime, they are. The tribal militants call themselves "Pakistani Taliban," or members of a newly coined and loosely knit entity, the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan. They openly recruit young men to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan and run their own Islamic kangaroo courts that, on occasion, stage public executions. The local police simply stay out of the way. "Fearing for their lives, no one dares to challenge them," says Afrasiab Khattak, former chairman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan...

"Religion is the opiate of the people". He had no concept of the Taliban, did he?