At least 67 people were killed and 70 others wounded today when a suicide bomber struck the main Sunni mosque in Darra Adam Khel, a Pashtun town along the border between the Khyber-Pakhtoonwhah Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Five others died and several more were wounded in an attack on a second mosque in Badhber.
A local Taliban faction claimed credit for the blast shortly thereafter, saying it was retaliation against a group calling itself the “peace committee,” a tribal faction which the government set up to launch attacks against Taliban targets. They threatened further attacks against such groups, which have been a common government creation in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Such tribal factions usually get set up as the result of a combination of bribes and threats from local and national government forces. In some cases the government provides weapons to the “peace committees” as well, but this is unlikely to be the case in Darra Adam Khel.
Darra Adam Khel is an almost legendary town where the vast majority of the population is directly involved in the manufacture of guns. A number of Pashtun tribes flock to the town to procure weapons from the tribal areas of Pakistan and, in some cases, Afghanistan. This makes the town of considerable strategic importance to both sides, though the local Afridi tribesmen’s independent streak has made it impossible for either outside Taliban factions or government forces to gain much of a foothold.
There will always be tribal warfare in central Asia. Uzbeks, Tajiks, Pashtun, whatever they are called – they will always fight. But usually in a slow and low-key way. The difference now is that Western money is spent on using some factions against other ones, and we are supposed to see this as a case of Good Guys vs. Bad Guys. Then the other side strikes back, both against the other tribe/"government"/whatever, and against their temporary Western allies. Gee, what a surprise.
All of this because – as a White House aide said – the neocons called for exploiting 9/11 for an invasion of Iraq only two days later. And, like the aide said, they decided Afghanistan had to be invaded first to pretend before the American people that it was about al-Qaeda. (Remember, the majority of the Americans supporting an invasion of Iraq also thought Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Qaeda.)
The neocons had been demanding an invasion of Iraq at least since the mid-1990s, because Iraq was supporting and financing Palestinian resistance groups, e.g. giving money to the families of dead suicide bombers. And so the Zionists calling themselves "neoconservatives" (not a single conservative domestic policy among them) called for the invasion of Iraq. Thus, Afghanistan. Thus, Pakistan. Thus, an increasingly bloody situation where Sunni mosques are blown up because their patrons are on the U.S.-funded side, the side of wedding-bombings and flying death drones.
Lovely.