Word: pakistani
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That's because this Pakistani frontier city, despite its large army garrison dating back to the British colonial days, had been in the grips of the Taliban's reign of fear. Nearly twice a week, they would send suicide bombers - often God-struck kids in their early teens - down from training camps in the mountains to blow themselves up at a busy crossroads or police station. They kidnapped rich businessmen, doctors and lawyers for ransom. And they silenced the music, shutting shops and banning songs at rowdy Pashtun tribal weddings, calling them "un-Islamic...
...heard the tinny, rat-tat-tat music welling up from the crowded lanes of the bazaar, he saw it as a sign that normality was returning to Peshawar. "We killed a lot of them," he says, referring to the militants known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) or the Pakistani Taliban who are at war with Islamabad while their Afghan brethren are hiding in these same saw-blade mountains to launch attacks on NATO forces across the border. The bombings are less frequent and the kidnappings, he says, have gone "from 50 a day to zero." Bringing music back...
...Pakistani army has won itself some ground, scattering Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan and Swat, but the real challenge lies ahead: how to rebuild a fiercely independent tribal society that has been shredding apart since the 1980s, when the Soviet war in Afghanistan brought in legions of revolutionary preachers and militants - armed with guns, money and the austere Salafist doctrine of Islam - who never departed...
...with good reason. General Khan reckons that the Pakistani Taliban have killed over 500 tribal elders since 9/11 for supposedly collaborating with Islamabad and Washington. Even after assurances from the army chief, the Mehsud elders are still afraid to venture back to their lands. "The jihad has eliminated the old tribal system of maliks," says General Khan. "Now any crook with a cell phone can call up a gang of his militant friends for any kind of mischief, and everyone is too afraid to stop them." His former colleague, Brigadier Mahmoud Shah, formerly in charge of security for the Northwest...
...hugely and immediately significant. Baradar, an Afghan, was the head of the Taliban's military council and the mastermind of the insurgents' bloody and relentless campaign against NATO and Afghan forces. A trusted friend of Omar's, Baradar may well know where the Taliban's spiritual leader is hiding. Pakistani intelligence and the CIA kept Baradar's capture secret for a week, giving interrogators a chance to investigate the network of contacts in his possession before the Taliban realized he had been seized...