Media reports suggest that as the peace deal establishing Islamic law across Malakand takes hold, Pakistan’s Taliban-styled militants are setting up a stronghold across the Swat Valley, putting the contentious groups within 65 miles of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
One senior security official in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) said that some of the militants had taken effective control over Buner District, putting the factions within striking distance of the city of Mardan and potentially, Islamabad.
At this point, the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) are patrolling the district while police are reportedly hiding out in their stations. TTP spokesman Muslim Khan says that they took over Buner because the government was failing to provide justice to the people. He says they intend to leave after Islamic law is implemented in the district, and that it did not signal a challenge to the government’s authority.
Petraeus and Mullen are well into the deep muddy and they don't even know it.
Afghanistan is just the catalyst. Pakistan foreshadows what will happen to the US — and also that the US Empire is the proximate cause of what is happening in Pakistan.
At the rate things are going — with US military desperately flying in troops from Iraq — and the high likelihood that Islamabad will very soon look like the last days of Saigon, with copters lifting people off the roof of the embassy in a rushed 'pull-out', it looks like the militarist, ruling-elite, arrogant empire and 'Vichy' facade of democracy called Pakistan will soon fall.
And what will happen first in the mini-me of Pakistan, with an oppressed working class revolting against the military and elitist boot of this US model ally will become a ticking clock for the same thing to happen to the global 'corporate financial Empire' nominally headquartered in the US, and passing itself off as a bigger version of a sham democracy.
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine