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US Drones Hit Key Militants along Pak Afghan Border

Drones Ferret Militants (Credit: tribune.com.pk)

Washington/Islamabad, August 25 – Badruddin Haqqani, the key operational commander of the al Qaeda linked Haqqani network, and top Pakistani Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah are believed to have been killed in US drone and air strikes in the tribal region of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Badruddin, the son of Afghan warlord.

Jalaluddin Haqqani, is ranked as a deputy to his elder brother and the network’s chief Sirajuddin and was believed to be killed in one of the five volleys of drone strikes in Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan since August 18.

Four of the missiles hit took place in Shawal Valley, considered to be traditional area of operations of Haqqani network in North Waziristan, and US reports said he may have been killed in the August 21 strike near Miranshah.

The wave of attacks drew strongest protest from Islamabad in recent years when a senior US diplomat was summoned by the Foreign Ministry to lodge their opposition to the attacks.

Badruddin, thought to be in his mid-30s, was a member of the Miranshah Shura Council, one of the Afghan Taliban’s four regional commands, which controls all activities of the militant group in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Senior US officials were quoted by the New York Times as saying that they had strong indications that Badruddin, the key commander of the Haqqani network which is responsible for most of the spectacular assaults on American bases and Afghan cities in recent years, was killed in a drone strike

Meanwhile, a statement by coalition forces in Afghanistan said that Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan leader Mullah Dadullah was among 20 militants killed in a “precision airstrike in Shigal wa Sheltan district (of) Kunar province yesterday.” Dadullah, whose real name is Maulana Mohammad Jamaluddin, was made the commander of Taliban in Pakistan’s Bajaur Agency in 2010. He fled to Afghanistan to escape an operation launched by the Pakistan Army. His deputy Shakir too was killed in the airstrike, the statement said.

Badruddin is one of the nine Haqqani family members who have been designated by the US as global terrorists. His brother Sirajuddin is the overall leader of the Miramshah Shura.

Siraj was designated by the State Department as a terrorist in March 2008 and in March 2009, the State Department put out a bounty of USD 5 million for information leading to his capture.

Giving details about the operation, American intelligence officials indicated to the Long War journal yesterday that the remotely piloted Predators and Reapers were targeting an “important Jihadi leader” in the region but his name was not disclosed.

“There are indications that Haqqani has met his demise,” a senior US official said in Washington yesterday.

He said officials were waiting to sift through evidence, including information on jihadist websites, before they could be certain that Haqqani had been killed.

The report said their caution stemmed from previous erroneous claims by American and Pakistani officials about militant deaths in Waziristan, a difficult place to get reliable information. But if confirmed, Haqqani’s death would be a “major benefit to the military coalition in Afghanistan.”

“Badruddin has been at the centre of coalition attacks in Afghanistan as well as mischief in Pakistan,” said the official. The Haqqani network has been blamed for some of the most spectacular assaults on US bases and Afghan cities in recent years.

By Friday evening, reports of Badruddin Haqqani’s death were circulating in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

In Washington, the White House and the CIA, which carries out drone strikes in Pakistan, declined to comment.

The latest string of drone attacks, most of them carried out in Shawal area of North Waziristan Agency, has renewed tensions between Pakistan and the US.

Nearly 40 suspected militants have been killed in these attacks, including a Kashmiri jihadi named “Engineer” Ahsan Aziz. Former Jamaat-e-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmed recently led funeral prayers in Mirpur for Aziz, who was killed in a drone strike on August 18.

Badruddin Haqqani runs the Haqqani network’s day-to-day militant operations, handles high-profile kidnappings and manages its lucrative smuggling operations, according to a report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.

In August last year, Afghan intelligence released intercepts of Badruddin Haqqani directing a daring assault on Kabul?s Intercontinental Hotel. Three years before that, he held a reporter for The New York Times, David Rohde, hostage.

The last major successful drone strike in Pakistan was the killing of al-Qaeda deputy leader Abu Yahya al-Libi in June.

US drones yesterday fired six missiles at three locations in Shawal Valley, destroying mud-walled compounds and two vehicles, Pakistani security officials and a Taliban commander said.

Among the 18 people killed was Emeti Yakuf, a senior leader of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a group from western China whose members are Chinese Uighur Muslim militants.

 

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Europe’s Economic Crisis Fuels Anti-Immigrant Sentiment

Immigrant protests in Greece (Credit: eutimes.net)

ATHENS, Aug 24: Greek police say up to 3,000 people have participated in a peaceful demonstration by immigrant groups in Athens on Friday to protest racist attacks in the crisis-struck country.

Protesters, most of who were from Pakistan, marched to Parliament shouting slogans and brandishing banners.

Friday’s march was held to protest increasing racist attacks and alleged cases of police brutality against immigrants.

Greece is the main entry point for illegal immigrants seeking a better life in the European Union.

The massive influx coincided with a spike in crime, and contributed to the sharp rise of the extreme-right, anti-immigrant Golden Dawn group that won 18 of Parliament’s 300 seats in June’s national elections.

Golden Dawn supporters have been repeatedly accused of violent attacks on immigrants, which the group says it does not condone.

 

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Flashback to the Musharraf Era

Baloch tribal chief Nawab Akbar Bugti (Credit: nation.com.pk)

After 9/11, the Musharraf administration’s alliance with the U.S. in the `War on Terror,’ allowed the army to clamp down on a simmering Baloch insurgency with the type of secrecy they used to hunt down Al Qaeda militants. While the Afghan Taliban was left free to operate in Balochistan, the administration made Baloch secessionists disappear under the smokescreen of combating terrorists.

Fuelling Balochistan’s insurgency was the fact that its disarming barren exterior hides rich deposits of minerals, coal and natural gas, which make a significant contribution to the nation’s energy needs. Islamabad’s failure to pay royalties and subsidies to Balochistan and its tight fisted control of the provincial government has fanned the tribal and secessionist movement, which reached a new pitch under Musharraf.

In 2005 when tribal leaders Nawab Akbar Bugti and Khair Baksh Marri mounted an insurgency against Musharraf, the army hunted down and killed their tribal fighters in the mountainous strong holds of Dera Bugti and Kohlu districts. In turn, the militant tribesmen ambushed and killed constabulary from the Frontier Corp, blew up gas pipelines and sabotaged train supplies to the province.

As rocket attacks accelerated, the Musharraf government set up a new military base and camps for army officers along the  Sui gas field. The military and Baloch militant nationalists now engaged in a full scale war,  backed by missiles and propaganda from both sides. From the government side, the District Coordination Officer Dera Bugti Abdus Samad Lasi told me that the tribal leaders like Nawab Akbar Bugti were responsible for keeping their people poor and backward, even as they used their tribesmen to fight their wars.

Enter a young woman doctor from Karachi, Dr Shazia Khalid, who then worked in Pakistan Petroleum Ltd, which manages the gas fields in Balochistan.  Living alone at the company’s onsite hospital, she was woken one night in January 2005 and reportedly raped at gunpoint by an army officer. Despite company directives to stay quiet, she testified against the offending captain.

Shazia’s testimony to the media sent a match through the smoldering Bugti insurgency.  Baloch insurgents intensified their attacks on army personnel and blew up gas pipelines, severing gas supply to the rest of the country.

Hustled into exile into London, Shazia spoke to me from her new location.  Gen. Musharraf had rejected insinuations that any army man could be involved.  However, annoyed by the negative publicity, Pakistan’s officials had arranged for her to go abroad. As she awaited an immigration visa for Canada, Musharraf  added insult to injury with his remark quoted in the Washington Post in September 2005: “If you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped.” The remark, obviously intended for a victim of rape, hurt the young woman.  “It has made me lose hope of receiving any justice in Pakistan,” Shazia told me in a voice muted with pain.

From his hiding place in Dera Bugti, the former governor of Balochistan and tribal chieftan, Nawab Akbar Bugti was livid that Shazia had been raped by an army man – and that he was being protected by the military president. In a voice that shook with anger, he told me that Baloch tribesmen would not rest until Shazia’s rapist was brought to trial. Without waiting to differentiate, he declared, “You in the West may take rape lightly but we in Balochistan consider it a grave human rights violation of women.”

The army used satellite telephones to trace Bugti to an elaborate complex of caves he inhabited in Dera Bugti, where he was killed in a massive army operation.

In the US, where President Musharraf had managed to blur the lines between the terrorism launched by the Taliban and insurgency by Baloch nationalists, Bugti’s murder was lumped with Pakistan’s ongoing war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The day after Nawab Akbar Bugti was murdered, an influential US newspaper cited Bugti’s murder as the death of a “terrorist.”

For a while Musharraf’s operation against the Baloch nationalists broke the back of the insurgency. But in death, Bugti became a martyr. It rekindled memories of Balochistan’s forced annexation to Pakistan and further provoked Baloch militants to seek arms and money from other countries in order to secede from the federation.

 

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Pakistan Suspends Phone Network to Thwart Attacks

Security Search over Eid in Pakistan (Credit: telegraph.co.uk)

The draconian security measure was imposed on Sunday at 8:00 pm, at a time when millions ordinarily telephone friends and relatives with greetings for Eid al-Fitr. Networks were working again on Monday mid-morning.

Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan’s two largest cities, and the troubled city of Quetta, in the insurgency-torn province of Baluchistan, were among the places where networks were suspended.

“We regret that it had to be suspended in some cities due to the risk of terrorist attacks,” Rehman Malik, the country’s interior minister, was quoted as saying by state TV.

“We regret inconvenience caused to youths and children.”

Terrorists were plotting to target “a few areas of Punjab province”, of which Lahore is the capital, the minister said. Sindh province, where Karachi is the capital, and Baluchistan were also targets, he added.

Authorities feared that mobile telephones could be used to coordinate attacks or trigger a remote-controlled bomb.

The Eid festival marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan and, in Pakistan, is accompanied by a three-day public holiday, until Thursday.

The country has been on alert for Eid and security forces stepped up their presence in major cities as celebrations got under way.

On Thursday, heavily armed militants stormed an air force base, the worst attack on a military facility for more than a year, sparking clashes that left 10 people dead.

On the same day, gunmen in military uniforms pulled 20 Shi’ite Muslim travellers from vehicles and shot them dead in the northwestern district of Mansehra.

Pakistan says 35,000 people, including more than 3,000 soldiers, have been killed as a result of terrorism since the 9/11.

 

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Accused in Fauzia Bhutto’s Murder Killed by Tribesmen

Nawabshah renamed Shaheed Benazirabad (Credit: pakmed.net)

KARACHI, Aug 20: The former Sindh Assembly lawmaker, Raheem Baksh Jamali, who was shot and injured in a mosque in Shaheed Benazirabad (formerly Nawabshah) on Sunday, succumbed to his wounds on Monday in a Karachi hospital, Geo News reported.

Reportedly, unknown gunmen attacked a mosque-bound Jamlai, who was observing Itikaf – an Islamic practice consisting of a period of retreat in a mosque during the month of Ramadan, especially the last ten days.

According to reports, the attackers, four in number, who knew exactly where to find him, got him in the main mosque in Cooperative Housing Society in Shaheed Benazirabad at 5:30 AM in the morning.

Jamali was shot and left for dead but the doctors in a local hospital where he was rushed to saved him form dying immediately before advising he be shifted to Karachi for further treatment.

Bullets had damaged his vital organs including pancreas, stomach and a kidney, which led to his death.

He was elected member Sindh Assembly in 1988 as a Pakistan Peoples Party candidate.

 

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Long-billed vulture population stabilising in Pakistan

Long billed Vulture (Credit: guardian.co.uk)

The alarming decline in a critically endangered species of vulture in Pakistan appears to have been halted, according to surveys of the birds. They indicate the population of the long-billed vulture (Gyps indicus) is stabilising.

The species had declined rapidly in the late 1990s because of the deadly effect of the cattle drug diclofenac. The birds died after eating carcasses contaminated with the drug.

Now fieldwork carried out in the Nagarparkar desert in Sindh, south-east Pakistan, by The Peregrine Fund, has shown that the population of the long-billed vultures has stablised over the past four breeding seasons with no obvious signs of decline. The 2006 annual report by the US-based TPF had reported 103 occupied long-billed nests, down from 290 in March 2003. WWF-Pakistan verified the same. In 2010/11 it counted 172 long-billed vultures in the same area.

TPF’s Munir Virani, now working as an ornithologist for the National Museum of Kenya, says banning diclofenac and increased awareness of the role of vultures in the ecosystem has proved effective.

Diclofenac was banned in 2006 and replaced by Meloxicam. However, the form of diclofenac given to human patients is still available and is sometimes given to animals.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s wild life authorities haven’t been able to reverse the decline in the population of the white-backed vultures (Gyps bengalensis).

In 2007, WWF-Pakistan had set up Vulture Conservation Centre in Changa Manga forest to retain and increase the population of white backs. About 22 birds from the wild were put in centre. However, the aviary has still not succeeded in breeding any from its stock. Last year a few eggs laid turned out to be infertile. Authorities are hoping the October egg-laying season this year would be different.

The forest, 50 miles southwest of Lahore, in Punjab, was once a stronghold of these birds with as many as “1400 active nests till the late 1990s” said Uzma Khan, project coordinator with the WWF.

Information gathered from 22 different sites (which had major colonies of white-backs till 2000), by the WWF in 2006 revealed only about 220 white-backed vultures remained in the Punjab. Today, Khan estimates there are not more than 100.

Early this year, the WWF also set up a 62-mile diameter vulture safe zone in the Nagarparkar desert. “The aim is to provide drug free food to the vultures close to their breeding areas,” said Uzma. It is also running an awareness programme for the local population and veterinarians informing them not to dump infected carcasses in the open and promoting the use Meloxicam.

 

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Aboard the Democracy Train Reviewed in US based Pakistan Link

www.pakistanlink.org/hussaini.htm

Nafisa Hoodbhoy’s book “Aboard the Democracy Train – A Journey through Pakistan’s Last Decade of Democracy” is a gripping account of the two-terms each of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif during 1988 to 1999. Both ascended the Prime Minister’s office through elections and both were sacked by the President of the time on charges of corruption.

Nafisa serving as the only female reporter with the premier English daily of Pakistan, Dawn, for sixteen eventful years, 1984-2000, had the advantage of covering for her paper all major developments of that period and taking mental notes to be incorporated in a book after the turmoil settled down and admitted of an objective evaluation of the events that continue to cast their shadow even to this day. Objectivity of a news reporter, particularly of a staid and sober paper like Dawn, has remained her forte even after a decade of departure from the paper.

Being an ardent feminist herself, she admired the courage, confidence and leadership qualities of Benazir Bhutto; yet, she has not swept under the carpet Benazir’s arrogance, obstinacy and several other weaknesses. Nawaz Sharif has received scant attention of Nafisa despite the fact that he was one of the two PMs who ruled during the period covered by her. One may regard the book as a narrative of Benazir’s struggle to nurture the seedling of democracy she had planted in the country.

The author has revealed her unique experiences while covering the major shifts on the political landscape and her interest in uncovering the elements behind the ethnic violence in Karachi, the city of her birth, the gradual usurpation of women’s basic rights, freedom of the media, and the unfortunate travel of the society from a pluralistic and tolerant group to an ideologically driven, radical community intolerant of any change or progress. It has thus become a static, stagnant community.

By any measure, Nafisa’s book is a valuable addition to the existing literature on Pakistan. It is not a work of scholarship, like the books of Ayesha Jalal, but it is a worthwhile reference book on the events of the crucial period covered by it. Its outstanding feature is its frontline account by a person known for her objectivity in reporting. Her account is racy, piquant and riveting. The reader finds himself disinclined to put the book down till he has finished it. Being a repertoire of anecdotes and quotable quotes, it holds the attention of the reader till the very end – like a work of fiction.

Nafisa’s investigative reports on the notorious Sindh Chief Minister, Jam Sadiq Ali and the hordes of dacoits he patronized make interesting reading.

Nafisa is the younger sister of Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, the famous nuclear scientist who teaches at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and is known for his bold and forthright views often expressed through articles in leading Pakistani papers. She was born in an eminent Ismaili family of Karachi and after schooling at premier educational institutions of Pakistan, reached the US and got her master’s degree in history at an American university. On return to Karachi, she joined the widely read and prestigious English daily, Dawn, and served it as a reporter for 16 years. She is married and has lived in the US since 2,000. Aboard the Democracy Train is her first book in which she has tried to provide an insider view of the complex history and politics of her homeland. Based in the US after 2,000, she has used her vintage point to focus on American involvement in Afghanistan, its impact on Pakistan and the unique features of a war that seems to have no winners.

In her Introduction to the book, she has given highlights of her personal and family life in Karachi and the impact of the Western education on her thought process. “While the public space for women in Pakistan had shrunk, I had returned from the US with a greater taste for freedom.”

She has also mentioned how the coming into existence of Pakistan had brought waves after waves of Indian Muslim migrants to Karachi changing permanently the socio-cultural complexion of the sleepy town, turning it into a metropolis and the center of the commercial hustle and bustle of the newly formed state.

Nafisa’s distaste for military rule became more intense with Gen. Zia sending Bhutto to the gallows in a controversial case. And, her admiration for Benazir increased in a similar proportion once she wiped her tears over the “judicial murder” of her father and donned the mantel of a political gladiator to wrestle against the military might. The more her success in that direction, the more became the admiration of Nafisa for her. Her book thus strikes as a combination of the history of the tumultuous decade and an account of Benazir’s Herculean success in gaining access to power. “Seeing my enthusiasm for a woman Prime Minister, the editor of the newspaper bypassed senior male reporters and nominated me, the only female reporter of Dawn, to cover Benazir Bhutto.” She had thus to travel with Benazir on the Democracy Train through the desert of Sindh and witness the unprecedented welcome accorded to her by villagers who had walked for miles on foot to get a glimpse of the courageous daughter of their great leader Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

During the rule of Jam Sadiq Ali, Chief Minister, Sindh was terrorized by gangs of dacoits said to be under the patronage of the Chief Minister. Nafisa, an unusually bold person, offered to do a story about them. Her visit to Matiari brought her in contact with people affected by Mohib Shidi in Matiari. She exposed the nexus between crime and politics in the province. The big landlords, Pir Pagara among them, were behind the dacoits while the small landowners, the main supporters of PPP, were punished in several ways for their support of PPP.

Covering the ethnic violence that erupted in Karachi in Aug-Sept, 1988, she discovered that the non-party election of Zia were at the root of the turmoil, since ethnicity became the binding factor in the absence of party affiliation. The MQM came into existence in 1985 shortly after Zia’s non-party elections.

She has given a vivid account of the threat of an attack on her by knife-wielding young men on September 23, 1991, within a day or so of the attack on Kamran Khan of the News, Karachi. That did in no way diminish her zeal to personally cover all such violent incidents and the mobilization of media protests against them.

A good portion of the book is devoted to the on-going struggle of enlightened women of Pakistan for their inalienable rights to freedoms denied to them on one pretext or another.

Nafisa Hoodbhoy has indeed produced a highly informative and readable book for Pakistanis at home and abroad.

arifsyedhussaini@Gmail.com

http://pakistanlink.org/hussaini.htm

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Pakistani Taliban Kill 22 Shiites in Bus Attack

ISLAMABAD, Aug 16 — Pakistani Taliban militants pulled 22 Shiites off buses and gunned them down in a remote northern mountain pass on Thursday, in the latest iteration of a pattern of attacks targeting religious minorities.

In the remote district of Mansehra, at least a dozen militants dressed in military fatigues stopped three buses carrying passengers on a rugged road from Rawalpindi to Astore. The militants checked the identification papers of passengers, singled out the Shiites and then shot them dead at point-blank range, police officials said.

The victims were mostly young men returning to their villages for Id al-Fitr, the Islamic festival that marks the end of Ramadan.

“The area is very remote and desolate,” said Rina Saeed Khan, an environmental journalist who traveled through the same route back to Islamabad on Wednesday. “The road is an alternate to the Karakoram Highway,” she said, referring to a famed road built by Chinese engineers.

The Babusar Top, where the killings took place, lies two hours from Astore. “There is no cellphone coverage, and you see no villages during the four-hour drive on a dirt road,” Ms. Khan said.

The episode on Thursday was similar to an attack in February in which 18 Shiites were killed after a bus was ambushed on the Karakoram Highway in the mountainous Kohistan district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. Ms. Khan said that after the February attack, travelers began using this alternate route in Kaghan Valley, which was still considered safe despite its harsh terrain. “Obviously, militants kept track of it, and they knew that people were returning to their homes for Id al-Fitr,” she said.

The Darra Adam Khel faction of the Pakistan Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack on the Shiites, Reuters reported. “We have targeted them because they are enemies of Sunnis and conspire against us,” Mohammed Afridi, a spokesman for the faction, was reported as saying in a telephone interview. “We will continue such attacks in the future.”

In recent months, attacks on Pakistani Shiites have increased, particularly in northern regions. Analysts have increasingly criticized the government, saying it has allowed itself to be distracted from protecting the country’s religious minorities. The government is embroiled in political turmoil, with an increasingly assertive Supreme Court that has singled out senior officials.

Ms. Khan, the journalist, said that she found a lot of anger and resentment among the locals during her visit to several northern towns.

“People are very upset,” she said. “They are asking, ‘Where is the government? Where is the military?’ ”

“Locals say Sunnis and Shiites used to live in harmony 10 years ago,” she said. “Life is too tough there, and Shiites and Sunnis used to cooperate. Locals say it’s the outsiders who are doing the killings.”

The Pakistani military said Thursday that it had opened an investigation into a predawn attack by Taliban militants on the Kamra air force base in Punjab. There has been speculation that the military is planning an offensive in North Waziristan, a haven for the Taliban and operatives of Al Qaeda, and some analysts said that the attack could have been meant as a warning against military action.

“The Taliban are telling Pakistan’s leadership, ‘If you hit us here, we’ll hit you,’ ” said Arif Rafiq, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

 

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‘ABOARD THE DEMOCRACY TRAIN’ COMING TO INDIA

The Indian edition of ‘Aboard the Democracy Train,’ will be released in India in September 2012, courtesy Anthem Press.

Now, India may quench its curiosity about common heritage neighbor  – Pakistan – carved out of its territory 65 years ago by the British.

The book has been written by the only woman reporter for the English language Dawn newspaper in the 1980s, at a time when the nation was under Gen. Zia ul Haq’s strict Islamic military rule.

It is a personal narrative of how the post partition exodus of Hindus, Christians, Zoroastrians and Jews had already begun to change the multi ethnic, multi religious fabric of the country.

The mass migration of Muslims from India into Pakistan is woven into the author’s journalistic experiences of how this transformed the ethnic and national politics of the country.

It is a story of Pakistan’s faltering democracy, with a front seat view of the rise and fall of the nation’s only woman prime minister – Benazir Bhutto.

For the contemporary Indian reader, the book gives insight into why the 11-year-old US invasion of Afghanistan appears to have driven war ravaged Pakistan to relax its anti India stance… leading to an ice thaw in the sub-continent.

Without glossing over Pakistan’s problems, the author has given a human face to the country – with the prospect of promoting  better understanding between the people of Pakistan and India.

Aboard the Democracy Train: A Journey through Pakistan’s Last Decade of Democracy
By Nafisa Hoodbhoy
Available in India in September 2012
Imprint: Anthem Press
ISBN 9789380601991
September 2012 | 268 Pages | 216 x 140mm / 8.5 x 5.5 | 16+ images and maps
Price: Rs 495.00

 

 

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Taliban attack Pakistani air base ahead of reported military operation

Minhas air base in Kamra (Credit: onlinenews.com.pk)

Islamabad, Aug 16: Militants targeted a major military air base some 30 miles northwest of Islamabad early Thursday morning, giving momentum within Pakistan to the prospect of a long-controversial military mission against elements in restive North Waziristan.

The battle between the military and the militants lasted for more than five hours and left nine militants and one soldier dead. Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the North Waziristan-based group, claimed responsibility for the attack.

Minhas air base at Kamra includes an aeronautical complex that produces and develops air and ground weapons. But the attack has drawn particular concern because the base has been widely reported to be equipped with nuclear weapons, though the military denies that.

Analysts in Pakistan are calling today’s attack the first of many to come in response to the reports of an operation by the Pakistani military in North Waziristan.

“The Kamra attack is an eye-opener that [the Taliban] can hit us anywhere, anytime, and the speech by the Army chief earlier had the same strategic message in it – that we need to unite against such elements and drive them out,” says a senior military official, referencing a televised speech by Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani on the operation.

The TTP has strengthened itself in North Waziristan in the past five years. The area is also reported to be home to the Haqqani network, which the US government blames for orchestrating attacks inside Afghanistan.

“Thursday’s attack epitomizes the blowback of a military operation in North Waziristan. And the worrying sign is the capacity of these terrorists to attack. If still nothing is done against them, they will only grow stronger. So it reinforces what we have been hearing about, a need of an operation in North Waziristan, where these elements operate freely,” says Cyril Almeida, a columnist who writes for the largest English daily paper in Pakistan.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday that General Kayani told US military officials that Pakistan planed to launch operations against Taliban militants in North Waziristan. Secretary Panetta acknowledged that the combat operation might not include offensives directly attacking the Haqqani network.

“We realize that the most difficult task for any Army is to fight against its own people. But this happens as a last resort. Our real objective is to restore peace in these areas so that people can lead normal lives,” the Pakistani Army chief emphasized in a speech on August 14. He then added that “no state can afford a parallel system or a militant force.”

Kayani attempted to address the popular sentiment among Pakistanis that the military was bending to America’s will. “The fight against extremism and terrorism is our own war, and we are right in fighting it,” he said in a televised speech.

However, many are skeptical about whether the operation will be effective if it does not attack the Haqqani network. “Our military is interested in acting against Pakistani-centric militants only, to stop attacks inside Pakistan like the one today,” adds Mr. Almeida.

Locals from North Waziristan also point out flaws in an operation in North Waziristan. “They have been talking about a possibility of an operation for the past three years. Do you think that the Haqqani network is going to sit around and wait?” says Safdar Dawar, president of the Tribal Union of Journalists.

According to intelligence officials who have operated in the tribal belt, the Haqqani network has more than a dozen places in Afghanistan to operate from.

“Other elements operating in North Waziristan have no place to go and can be targeted as they have been cornered into this area,” says Brig. Asad Munir, who belongs to the tribal belt and retired from military a few years ago.

Munir, who has served in key intelligence positions in the tribal belt, says the military operation will improve relations between Pakistan and America, but not for that long. And given the terrain between Pakistan and Afghanistan, security experts say it is almost impossible to seal this border.

“North Waziristan has been the most strenuous issue between the two countries, and the US believes if Pakistan acts in this area, the insurgency in Afghanistan will be controlled. But without border control from both sides, the operation may not be so successful,” the brigadier adds.

This is not the first time a military base in Pakistan has been attacked.

In 2009, the headquarters of the military came under a siege that lasted for 20 hours. And last year, an attack at a naval base in the port city of Karachi lasted for almost 15 hours.