PoliGazette » Pakistani Forces Take On Taliban

Pakistani Forces Take On Taliban

Filed under: Afghanistan, Asia, Pakistan, Taliban — Michael van der Galien, Editor-in-Chief on June 30, 2008 @ 5:00 pm CEST

It’s about time that Pakistan is finally acting against the Taliban. It took the new Pakistani government several months, but it finally seems to realize that you can’t talk to the Taliban forever. Sometimes reality is truly quite simple; the Taliban are extremists, bend on taking over entire countries, not just Afghanistan. The pose a threat to the Afghani and the Pakistani governments.

The question is, however, whether the Pakistani government considers this to be the first of many military strikes against the Taliban, or whether it’s a relatively minor operation meant to weaken the Taliban, after which they will be allowed to regroup. It could very well be that the government wants to send a message to the Taliban in order to speed up peace talks and to control the damage they are doing in the North-Western part of the country.

For now, it seems that Pakistan follows a ‘moderate’ course in so far that it’s not willing to truly destroy the Taliban, probably fearing that doing so may result in terrorists attacks at home, and an increase of extremist activities and activists in general. This may make sense to Pakistan in the short term, but one wonders what the long term plan is; you can’t contain extremists forever.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

PoliGazette encourages comments from all viewpoints, especially those that disagree. Comments submitted must, however, adhere to the following standards. Comments that violate these standards may be edited or deleted without notice at the sole discretion of the editors. Commenters who repeatedly or egregiously violate these standards or who attempt to argue publicly with editors regarding the comments policy may be banned from commenting further.

(1) Comments should address the substantive content of the post. Comments that repeatedly or willfully misrepresent the content of the post or of others' comments are not welcome. Comments that respond to something other than which the contributor or commenter may have said are irrelevant and should not be posted.

(2) Comments should avoid use of vulgar language as well as racial, ethnic, or religious slurs.

(3) Comments should not personally attack the character, personal integrity, or professional reputation of any PoliGazette contributor or of other commenters.

(4) Comments should reflect the contributions of the commenters themselves and should not include extensive cut-and-paste reproductions of others' words except insofar as necessary to supplement the commenter's own arguments. Link spam, trackback spam, and propaganda spam will be instantly deleted.

Questions or challenges to these policies or their application should be directed to the editors by email.