Pakistan faces full scale war against the Taliban

[Joanne98]

The skiing season at Malam Jabba, Pakistan's only ski resort, is over. Yesterday the pistes echoed with the sound of explosions as fighter jets screamed overhead, part of the Pakistan military's intensifying campaign to dislodge the Taliban from the Swat Valley.

An hour's drive away in Mingora, the war-racked valley's main town, the Taliban and army are readying for an urban battle unprecedented in the short history of Pakistan's battle against the Taliban.

Pakistan's prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, today said the army was fighting for "the survival of the country", speaking after an emergency cabinet meeting.

The country's leaders, encouraged by the US, launched the full-scale offensive in Swat last week in order to halt the spread of Taliban control which had spread to districts within 60 miles of the capital. The battle has now been taken to the heart of the north-west region of the country which the Taliban has seized as its powerbase, and in particular to the beleaguered, frightened town of Mingora.

This once-bustling riverside community, nestled between orchards and rolling mountains, has become a hub of the dispossessed and the desperate. Since fighting erupted last Tuesday, following the collapse of a fragile peace deal, tens of thousands of frantic residents have fled, scrambling on to buses, cars and even rickshaws. They left behind a ghost city controlled by the Taliban, under siege from army mortar fire and helicopter gunship assaults, and tensed in the expectation of an army ground offensive that could lead to urban warfare reminiscent of Russian bids to clear Grozny, Chechnya, in 1999 and 2000.

At Mingora hospital yesterday embattled medics struggled to tend to dozens of residents injured by army shelling and stray gunfire. Riaz Khan, a 36-year-old teacher, his wife and two daughters occupied four of the beds, suffering shrapnel wounds to the arms and legs. His two other daughters were killed by an army mortar last week, he told an Associated Press reporter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/09/pakistan-taliban-swat-valley

I looks like Obama has decided that since the Taliban is trying to grab the Paki nukes he might as well go all out to get Osama Bin Laden. And wouldn't that just shoot his numbers up to the moon?

I'd like to see anyone stand in the way of his agenda after that.

[niceypoo]

1. This is the result of Bush ignoring Bin Laden....

....and using 911 as an excuse to grab oil.

[BeFree]

2. It seems

We have pushed the Taliban out of Afghanistan into Pakistan. Those ruthless mofos don't give a crap about people. Maybe we should carve a piece out of Afghanistan and tell the Taliban to go live there in peace. Of course, then they'd be concentrated in one area so if we did that we'd have to sign accords and treaties ensuring them that as long as they stayed there they could live in peace? Oh, wait, the US's record of following treaties is pretty bad, eh?

And as for the Pakistani people.... dare I say were it Americans we would stand and fight in our hometowns and not run to some imagined safety as refugees?

[Aslanspal]

3. I support this....we are training the Paks in counter insurgency....

.....and having some success...the black turbans raise arms against us they will die...they are the stoneage past with wacko beliefs against women and progress.

The United States of America stands with Pakistan in cutting out the cancer and rebuilding and resettling people who want peace and not be beaten to death because they are not covered head to toe in black in 90 degree heat.

To Hell with the Taliban and the black turbans, they will die if they do not lay down their arms and join the human race and I sincerely doubt they will they are zealots willing to die...then so be it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. If they're haveing emergency cabinet meetings, what is the Pakistani president doing

appearing on Meet The Press in the USA? He should be racing back - he's not a figurehead president, he's meant to be a real leader.

[Joanne98]

5. True. Maybe he's playing the "plausible deniability" game...

He doesn't want to be there when it happens.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

6. $$$