Confronting taliban, Pak finds itself at war

But Mr. Zaman said he was furious with the government for not holding anyone responsible for the killing and wounding of civilians. “In Bajaur, innocent people are being killed as infidels, the dead cattle are lying on the road, the roads are tainted with the blood of the people who have been killed,” he said. On return trips in recent weeks, he said, his village was “full of the rotten smell of dead animals.”“Why not target the real people, the administration knows where they are,” Mr. Zaman said. In another ward, Amin Baacha, 13, lay with only one arm, his right one had been amputated. An army helicopter had circled his family’s pickup truck as they were fleeing their village and fired on them, the boy said.

An Insurgent Sanctuary. At a briefing at army headquarters in Rawalpindi on Monday, the military said it believed that Fakir Mohammed, the leader of the Taliban in Bajaur, had taken sanctuary in the neighboring Mohmand district. Another important commander, an Afghan Taliban, Qari Ziaur Rehman, had moved back to Afghanistan, it said.In Swat, the Pakistani Army has been fighting the Taliban for more than two months, and still the Taliban hold the upper hand, according to accounts from people who have fled the area.Reports of Taliban terrorism are widespread. Many residents of Swat say they are exasperated by the army-imposed round-the-clock curfew that keeps them indoors listening to the scream of jets and the thud of artillery. To increase the misery, the Taliban blew up the power grid last week, and when protesters gathered in the main street of Mingora, the police fired on them, killing six people. More than 140 girls schools have been destroyed by the Taliban in the last several months. In a typical technique to raise funds, the militants ordered the shopkeepers in the mall in the town of Matta to stop paying rent to the landlord and pay the militants instead. “There is no light, no gas, no water, no food,” Mr. Khan said.

Despite all the distress of the civilians, “only two Taliban commanders have been killed,” he said. “The army has its strategy, but they don’t explain.”The one hope in the gloom of war, said civilians and law enforcement officials, has been the formation of small private armies by tribal leaders, known in the region as lashkars.