Pakistani Forces Take On Taliban
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.
