Word: waziristan
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...recent months, the U.S. military has staged increasingly frequent drone attacks against militants in the tribal area of North Waziristan, while the Pakistani military has sought to crush the Taliban in several fierce offensives in South Waziristan and Orakzai. But the militants have proved resilient, and their ability to stage massive attacks appears intact. The combined offensives against them meant the Taliban "simply spread out wherever they could to other areas," says Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. "I was under no illusion that this phenomenon is gone, that they would...
...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...
...agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had netted a very big fish: Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Afghan Taliban's military chief. In quick succession, the ISI had also rolled up two of the Taliban's "shadow" governors of Afghanistan's provinces and another senior figure. And in North Waziristan, near Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, a missile launched from a CIA drone had struck at the heart of the Haqqani network, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group responsible for countless attacks on NATO troops. The network's current leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, survived, but his younger brother Mohammed had been killed...
...Haqqani network has frequently bedeviled U.S. military plans, as Afghan fighters have too easily slipped across the border and found sanctuary. But a year's worth of diplomatic pressure on Islamabad began to pay off before Operation Moshtarak: Pakistan launched a major military offensive of its own in South Waziristan, not against the Afghan Taliban but against its Pakistani cousins known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan...
...Qaeda remains the strategic reason for the current fighting; one of Obama's grounds for staying the course in Afghanistan is to prevent bin Laden from re-establishing safe havens there. But the only area of real military activity against al-Qaeda at the moment is in North Waziristan, where the Pakistani military is not active. The U.S. is doing the attacking, primarily with drones...