afghanistanTehrik-e-Taliban attacked government buildings, churches, schools, Shi‘a
mosques and shrines, and assassinated prominent military officers and
politicians. In the autumn of 2007 the Pakistan Taliban overran Swat and
at one point came within two hours’ drive of Islamabad. The Pakistan army
eventually drove them out of the region, but two years later the Tehrik-e-
Taliban retook most of the lost ground. A second major military campaign
that lasted more than six months eventually regained control over the
region but the Pakistan Taliban were far from defeated. Today they still
pose a serious threat to the Pakistan government and continue to mount
regular and devastating attacks, particularly in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa
and Baluchistan.
In 2004 Musharraf reluctantly sent the army into Southern Waziristan
to evict foreign jihadists affiliated to al-Qa‘ida, but the campaign met with
limited success. After Barack Obama became President of the United States
in February 2008 his administration, fed up with the duplicity of Pakistan’s
policy on Afghanistan and antiterrorism, demanded stronger action
against insurgents and u.s. Special Forces and drones began to attack high-
value targets on the Pakistan side of the Durand Line. In the autumn of
2009, 28,000 Pakistani troops, backed by aircraft and helicopter gunships,
was once more sent into Southern Waziristan, to suppress non-Pushtun
jihadists. Following the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan’s (imu) attack on
Jinnah International Airport, Karachi, in June 2014, designed in part as
retaliation for the Waziristan campaign, Pakistan launched another major
operation aimed at eliminating the imu, this time in Northern Waziristan.
From the autumn of 2008 the Pakistan army had also conducted oper ations
against the Tehrik-e-Taliban in Bajur and Buner districts of what was now
Khyber Pukhtunkhwa. These operations, reminiscent of the Frontier Wars
of the colonial era, failed to defeat the Pakistan Taliban while at the same
time the Pakistan army avoided any confrontation with the Afghan Taliban
and cross-border infiltration into Afghanistan continued unabated.
Pakistan’s inability to defeat these militant movements, or suppress
radical indigenous Islamists, has led to great suffering for ordinary
Pakistanis. Since 2001 some 35,000 civilians have been killed in hundreds
of terrorist attacks and thousands more injured. Among the victims have
been former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, several provincial gover-
nors and more than 150 children of army officers who were killed when
the Tehrik-e-Taliban stormed the Military School in Peshawar. President
Musharraf himself was lucky to survive at least two attempts on his life. By
conservative estimates, between 2005 and 2013 more than 49,000 Pakistani
civilians were killed as a result of terrorist incidents, military operations