Word: pakistani
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...took just a few months for the Pakistani military to clear the Swat Valley's lush, mountainous tribal terrain of its Taliban usurpers last summer, using some 30,000 troops to dislodge the guerrillas from the once-bustling tourist haven, 80 miles northwest of the capital Islamabad. Now, however, almost a year after winning the war, the same number of troops are still in place in order to hold Swat, rebuild it and prevent a Taliban resurgence - and that may keep Islamabad from going after the extremists in other parts of Pakistan's unruly frontier with Afghanistan...
...giving Benazir Bhutto adequate security was a deeply cynical, deliberate decision," says Cyril Almeida, a respected analyst with the Pakistani newspaper Dawn. "The assassins may have been intent, but they were given an opportunity." (See TIME's photo-essay "Aftermath of an Assassination...
...after Bhutto was killed, Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema, a senior official at the Interior Ministry, held a press conference, on Musharraf's instructions, to pin the assassination on Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed last August in a rocket strike in South Waziristan - a claim later supported by the CIA. According to the report, it was no secret that Pakistan's militants loathed Bhutto and her stance against Islamist violence. But the Musharraf government's "hasty" announcement, the report says, "was premature at best" and "prejudiced the police investigations which had not yet begun...
...Having highlighted the murky role of Pakistan's military establishment, says Ali Dayan Hasan, a Human Rights Watch analyst interviewed three times by the U.N. commission, "one hopes that the report will allow the Pakistani government room to conduct a meaningful investigation and bring the perpetrators to book...
...Despite the questions raised by the U.N. probe, investigation of possible military involvement in Bhutto's assassination will prove extremely difficult. Musharraf now languishes in self-imposed exile in London, beyond the reach of Pakistani authorities. And the army he left behind, whose political clout is undiminished, is unlikely to accept a potentially humiliating probe into one of its longest-serving commanders in chief. "No credible criminal investigation can proceed in Pakistan," says Farzana Shaikh, a senior Pakistan analyst at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs, "because that would mean going to the heart of the military...