Overwhelming force will not end Pakistan's war in Waziristan, reports Graham Usher Last week Saima Rahman died from a shrapnel-perforated skull in the Hayatabad Medical-Complex in Peshawar. She was three years old. There were no relatives at the bedside -- only a nurse and a tribesman in traditional Pashtun garb of cap and smock. "It's better for her," he said. "Her parents and the rest of her family are dead." Saima had been one of 20 bullet-riddled casualties brought to the hospital from North Waziristan, site of ferocious clashes this month between the Pakistani army and Pashtun tribesmen. The army says it is fighting a war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. The tribesmen say the army is killing civilians, including women and children like Saima. Both are right. North Waziristan is a tribal agency wedged up against Pakistan's mountainous border with Afghanistan. Since their fall from power in 2001, Taliban fighters have used the territory as a base to wage their anti-NATO insurgency. For the last year, according to Washington, the enclave has also been a "safe haven" for Al-Qaeda-inspired foreign fighters planning attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Europe and the US. Few dispute there are foreigners in Pakistan's remote borderlands -- mostly Uzbek Islamic fighters who took refuge there after the Taliban's ouster. There are also Arabs, including financiers of the Taliban, the remnants of Al-Qaeda. But the idea that North Waziristan represents "Al-Qaeda central" as claimed by some American and Asian analysts is moot, says journalist and authority on Pakistan's tribal areas Rahimullah Yousefzai. "Nobody really knows," he says, regarding the extent of the Al-Qaeda presence in the tribal areas. But what is known does not seem to square with the American picture. The last time an Al-Qaeda commander was killed in North Waziristan was December 2005, says Yousefzai. And when Al-Qaeda leaders have been captured -- like 9/11 architect Khaled Sheikh Mohamed -- it has been in Pakistan's cities rather than border regions. He also questions whether Osama bin Laden and Ayman El-Zawahri would hang out in a territory crawling with 100,000 Pakistani troops and an unknown number of US special forces. Still, under American pressure, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf sent more soldiers to North Waziristan in July, breaking a yearlong truce with pro-Taliban tribesmen. He was also bracing for retaliation from the army's raid on Islamabad's Red Mosque that left 100 dead, including pro-Taliban clerics and seminary students. Since then, more than 1,000 people have been killed in the tribal areas, including 250 in October, and 50,000 driven from their homes. The precise distribution of the dead is unknown, but they include soldiers, fighters and civilians. But rarely has an internal Pakistani conflict been so brutal, even on the wild Afghan frontier. Some 280 soldiers are currently being held hostage by the Taliban in the neighbouring South Waziristan agency. Four soldiers have been killed, including one who was beheaded on video. The Taliban say more will die unless the army leaves South Waziristan and prisoners are freed. The demands -- and methods -- are the same in North Waziristan. On 6 October, pro-Taliban tribesmen ambushed an army convoy. Twenty-two soldiers were killed, some with their throats slit. Local villagers were among the killers. And the army went berserk, says Yousefzai. "This is not an army offensive against Al-Qaeda or foreign fighters -- it's revenge. The army is basically saying to the tribesmen that 'if you host the Taliban and they attack our convoys, we will bomb your villages.' That's why helicopters are being used, that's why civilians are being killed. It's a policy of collective punishment." It's a policy the army does not overly try to deny. "The basic fault lies with the militants," says army spokesman, Major General Wahid Arshad. "They use these houses for firing on security forces and, obviously, when somebody fires on troops it becomes a legitimate target to be engaged. When engaged, the people who live there also suffer casualties." Forty-five-year-old Rakeev Gul knows what it's like to be "engaged". Sitting cross-legged outside the hospital, he recalls an afternoon "about a week ago" when four Cobra helicopters started to drop "pencil-shaped" bombs on his village in North Waziristan. "We were at prayer when the earth beneath us rocked. Five of our houses were razed to rubble. Nine people were buried alive, including women and children. Others we pulled from the ruins and brought here. Ours wasn't the only village bombed." Tribesmen listen to Gul's narrative. One admits he is not enamored of the Taliban, nor of the foreigners in their midst. "We sometimes feel we are caught between the aircraft in the sky and the knives on the ground. We get it from both sides," he says. But, insists Gul, the Taliban is native to North Waziristan. The Pakistan army is not. Worse, it's seen as doing the bidding of Washington, a force the tribesmen regard as inherently hostile to Muslims. "Whatever the internal differences between us, Pashtuns unite when faced by an external power," says Gul. "And the Taliban grow stronger with every child we bury."
