Word: swatting
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Indeed, the Pakistanis say, while they have largely cleared militants from Swat, which is in the North-West Frontier Province, as well as the South Waziristan and Bajaur areas along the Afghan border, the army remains engaged in battles in the Khyber district not far from Swat and nearby Orakzai, where the army claims almost daily double-digit Taliban kill figures (numbers that cannot be independently verified...
...more to holding an area than just boots on the ground. As part of its counterinsurgency strategy, the Pakistani military says it is taking the lead in eliminating the factors that helped the area fall to the extremists in the first place: poverty and bureacractic ineptitude and corruption. In Swat, it has set up joint civilian-military liaison cells, which bring together representatives of the military, provincial government and tribal elders. "There are so many reasons that we fell to them [the Taliban] and they took over, so many reasons," says Bakhd Zada, a tribal elder from Devlai, a town...
Lieutenant Colonel Akhtar Abbas, army spokesman in Swat, says the military is taking its cue from the populace. "We listened to them, we tried to solve their problems," he says. "They're our own brothers and sisters, we're not like the Americans in Iraq...
...Swat, the military has surged ahead of an excruciatingly slow civilian bureaucracy. Soldiers are reconstructing roads, bridges, health centers, water systems and libraries across the valley. The Army has recruited and trained thousands of police officers, and rebuilt 217 of the 400 or so schools destroyed by the Taliban. It is also footing the bill, thanks to a nationwide voluntary contribution of two days' pay by the troops themselves, a move that raised more than 100 million rupees (almost $1.2 million). The military is also much more efficient. Lt. Col. Abbas points to the restoration of a historic hostel...
Commissioner Fazal Karim Khattak, the administrative head of the provincial government in Swat and seven other nearby districts, rejects criticism that the government isn't doing enough, although he admits that there is a heavy reliance on the military. The destruction is so widespread, he says, that it's "not really possible" for the government to do it alone. "I would recommend that the army stays here in the same numbers for quite some time," he adds, "because the civilian institutions have been ruined so much that it will take some time for them to stand on their own feet...