The ‘Talibanization' of Pakistan's biggest city

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Posted: Tuesday, September 30, 2008 12:28 PM
Filed Under: Islamabad, Pakistan
By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent

KARACHI, Pakistan – In the back of a jeep driving through Karachi, a sign on the wall of the city's famous "Village Restaurant" caught my eye. It was just a little piece of frayed white paper plastered next to the restaurant's much bigger logo, tempting customers to "Experience the Exotic of Traditional Dining."

But the printed sign expressed an increasingly urgent plea in this teeming port city, once Pakistan's capital: "Save your city from Talibanization," it said in English.

But could the Taliban really be taking over Karachi? Karachi is Pakistan's biggest city, far from the lawless tribal hinterland along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Out there, Taliban and al-Qaida militants have carved out an independent state. In the mountains, militants have their own courts and even issue licenses to local business. Last week in the tribal area, the Taliban publicly executed a group accused of murders. In another village square, they flogged several butchers for allegedly selling the meat of sick animals. That is Taliban justice.

U.S. military and intelligence officials consider that border area to be the world's biggest, most dangerous safe haven for Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and nearly all of their deputies have been based, and may still be based, in this often impassible mountain terrain.

But I was in Karachi, a giant city on the Indian Ocean. If Karachi is being ‘Talibanized,' Pakistan is in real trouble, and so is everyone else.

Growing radicalism
Karachi has a history of Islamic radicalism. Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in front of the Village Restaurant in 2002. Pearl had been meeting contacts here. They were supposed to help him investigate Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber" who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris in December 2001.

But Pearl's meeting was a set up. The "contacts" turned out to be fanatic militants who kidnapped and beheaded him. I was about to discover the radicals' presence in this city appears to have grown since then.

Traveling in Karachi is both overwhelming and exhausting. It is a colorful, chaotic and undeniably dirty city. Flocks of vultures circle the sky all day. Trash lines many of the streets. As we drove from the Village Restaurant, our jeep darted around swarms of motorcycles, pickup trucks, rickshaws and even a sad looking camel pulling a cart stacked with barrels.


NBC News
An empty street in Karachi, Pakistan.

We were headed to a neighborhood in west Karachi where I had been told al-Qaida and Taliban militants had established a safe haven. Many Pakistanis make little distinction between al-Qaida and the Taliban. Both want to destabilize Pakistan and Afghanistan, establish an even bigger base of operations and spread their aggressive, intolerant vision of Islamic law.

The majority of people in Karachi want no part of it. Karachi is Pakistan's cultural capital, the center of the nation's fashion, high-tech and media industries. But that Karachi is under siege.

After about 30 minutes in traffic, our jeep arrived at the office of a local contact in a slum in west Karachi. Fearing for his safety, he didn't want to be identified. I'll call him Malik. He would take us deep into the alleys on the outskirts of Karachi, a neighborhood filled with brick homes built around cliffs and marble quarries. It would be unwise, Malik said, to venture in alone.

"It is too dangerous," he said. "The Talibans have their checkpoints, bunkers and snipers. At night, they patrol, sometimes on horses. They are always coming out with their weapons and RPGs intimidating people."

Malik said radicals have been flooding into Karachi since this spring, moving in from the border region. The border region is now a warzone, under attack by the Pakistani military and, controversially here, by U.S. drones and Special Operations Forces (SOF) that carry out raids from bases in neighboring Afghanistan.

The Pakistani and U.S. military offensives have killed hundreds of militants, but scattered many more. Increasingly, they are settling in Karachi. Estimates of Karachi's population range from 12 to 18 million. The lack of accountability makes the city a great place to hide, unless you look like I did as I descended from the jeep dressed in khakis and a blue shirt.

Malik and I were standing in front of one of west Karachi's madrassas, a traditional Islamic school for boys.

"Are there any students inside," I asked a guard. He stared back at me blankly. In less than a minute there were about 15 people around us. Several appeared to be madrassa students who had come out to see what a foreigner could possibly want from them.

"Are you all students at the madrassa?" I asked. A few said they were.

‘God willing, we will fight them'
Many Pakistanis attend madrassas because they offer free education, supplementing the government's lacking public school system. For centuries madrassas were the only form of education in the Islamic world. From Morocco to Indonesia, most madrassas have a similar layout, with a mosque at the center and classrooms upstairs. The vast majority of madrassas are moderate charities that teach religious values, the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet Mohammed.

But some madrassas in Pakistan have churned out suicide bombers indoctrinated in jihad and a paranoid but widespread philosophy that they must attack innocent civilians to defend their faith from the United States, Israel and other modern-day "crusaders."

Former President Pervez Musharraf promised to reform and regulate Pakistan's hard-line madrassas. It never happened. According to Karachi's former mayor Farooq Sattar, there are now more than 2,000 illegal madrassas in Karachi alone. This was one of them.

"What do you think of the Taliban and their influence here?" I asked the students.

More blank stares.

"What do you think about the U.S. incursions?"

That got a reaction.

"God willing, we will fight them," said one teenager with a purple scar on his chin. "They are the enemy," he said and launched into a long explanation of America's goal to occupy Muslim lands and undermine Islam. I've heard the same speech from Cairo to Lebanon, Baghdad to Riyadh. God bless the Internet.

A few minutes later my driver/fixer, a very tough guy from a very tough part of Pakistan, tapped me on the shoulder.

"I think you have been here long enough," he said. It was time to go.

But I still hadn't seen any Taliban.

Malik suggested we go deeper into the slum, to the neighborhood right under the cliffs and quarries. He was nervous about taking a foreigner, but had an idea. There was a graveyard in the area.

"We can pretend to be offering prayers for the dead," Malik suggested. "I'll pray over one of the graves and you can see the neighborhood for yourself."

Malik said praying at a gravesite would give us an excuse to be in the area and raise less suspicion.

‘You should not be here'
It didn't exactly work. As soon as I stepped out of the jeep by the gravestones, I was again surrounded by a group of people. They didn't have weapons or appear threatening, but didn't attempt to hide their sympathies for the Taliban. One man proudly told me several suicide bombers had prayed in a nearby mosque.

But others were scared of the Taliban. A man who spoke English told me the Taliban were in control of the area.

"Do the Pakistani police or soldiers ever come here?" I asked him. "No, they can't come here."

"How do people feel here?"

"We are all frightened. The Taliban has taken over."

More men, athletically built in their 20s and 30s, started to arrive.

"Who are these people?" I asked the English speaker.

"They are Taliban."

"Do they understand what we are saying? Do they understand English?"

"No, but you shouldn't stay here. It is not comfortable here. You should not be here."

"Who runs this neighborhood?"

"They do."

The new arrivals didn't want to be interviewed.

"Stop asking them questions," the English speaker advised.

We left a few minutes later.

"We couldn't come here at night," Malik said as we were driving out of the neighborhood. "Now we had an excuse to come to the graveyard. But at night, there would be no reason to be here."

‘It's sad'
Driving back to the hotel, I kept thinking how a neighborhood in Karachi could be so tense and apparently out of control. In less than two hours, and without any prior arrangements, we'd managed to get to an area full of Taliban supporters and where many locals were clearly terrified.

As I walked back to my hotel room, I passed an old man in the hallway.

"I didn't know you people were still coming here," he said. By "you people" I assumed he meant foreigners.

"Yes, a few. Not many of us," I admitted.

"I didn't think anyone would be coming anymore," he added, saying he was upset by the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, one of the centers of social life for Pakistan's shrinking expatriate community.

"It's sad," he said. "It's sad it's come to this."

"Yes, it's sad," I agreed.
 

bushman
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By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent



The guy is a fucking jew Tizzy.

He's as useful as protestant British guy filing news reports about Catholics in Ireland.

i.e. his stuff is a waste of bandwidth.

I'm not exactly a woglover but jewish guys "reporting about wogs" is an insult to western culture as far as I'm concerned.
 
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The guy is a fucking jew Tizzy.

He's as useful as protestant British guy filing news reports about Catholics in Ireland.

i.e. his stuff is a waste of bandwidth.


Calling someone a fucking jew... sounds racist to me.
 

the bear is back biatches!! printing cancel....
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pakistan is turning into one shit hole and what we are doing there isn't working

not really sure what this has to do with jews :)
 

bushman
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At the end of the day we're all trapped with our culture.

As a Catholic I would never believe a thing the British Government says or claims about Catholics.

To expound a jewish dude as some kinda relevant unbiased authority on Pakistan is so taking the fucking piss it's out of the ballpark.
 

the bear is back biatches!! printing cancel....
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pakistan's stock market has crashed, all capital has fled, and a potential civil war

the good muzzies vs. the bad muzzies

is slowly brewing

bhutto getting offed was a sad sad day for that country......and things have gotten worse since

plus unlike iraq and all the other shit we fucked around with

they got nukes
 

bushman
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It makes as much sense as a Gaza strip dude being the chief foreign correspondent for NBC and writing about Israel.

Forgetaboutit.

credibility=zero
 

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pakistan is turning into one shit hole and what we are doing there isn't working

not really sure what this has to do with jews :)

3 foreign entities have contributed heavily to the Obama campaign. Hamas,
Nigeria & Pakistan. Figures!
 

the bear is back biatches!! printing cancel....
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well i've read alot of articles from non jews at asian times about the problems in pakistan and their viewpoint is the same

this doesn't mean the jews and west should bomb pakistan i really don't understand why the jew thing is such a big deal....

the new pakistan leader wants us to stay the fuck out and warning shots were fired at helicopters of ours recently

as US involvement is creating backlash and sympathy for the bad guys

the whole problem is the whole world is going broke

best thing you can do is pump money into the country so the maddrasses and such aren't left giving the people the necessities such as food, shelter, education, etc......since the government can't provide it for them.....

all the drug money from afghanistan is slowly filtering into pakistan and giving them more sympathy and clout
 

bushman
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Pakistan has its problems, and they have a lot of red states in the border zones, hillbilly bastards who border on places like Afghanistan and who are bigtime islamic freaks.

The educated Liberals run the military, and at the end of the day the military run Pakistan, it's a lot like Turkey.


As long as they can keep those red-stater inbred religious hillbilly fucks at bay then they'll be fine.


In some respects the Pakistani civil war aint started yet, like you had your war in 1861-1865 and we had ours in 1642-1651 and 1745 with the hillbillies.

The US media has already taken the piss out of Americans with the information smokescreen run up to the Iraq war, if you guys aint ever going to be capable of reading between the lines of bias then the media is going to be taking the piss out of you until you fucking die.

Even the BBC sucks nowadays, but people have the internet.
Use the internet. Learn.
 

the bear is back biatches!! printing cancel....
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dude obviously our actions in afghanistan to date have failed and made the taliban stonger....poppy seed cultivation is though the roof.....

obviously our foreign policy related to this region isn't working

its a complex situation and i honestly don't know what the right answer is

but what we are doing i know is wrong

at the same time i don't think the ron paul answer of do nothing it'll all figure itself out likely isn't the right answer either

hopefully india gets more involved and the leadership on both sides can work together a little better...

they have a much bigger vested interest in a stable pakistan than the US

i don't know much about the new guy that took over for mushareef.....the fact that he's standing up to the US more IMO is a good thing.....US involvement at least militarily within their borders will only make things worse IMO....
 
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Pakistan has its problems, and they have a lot of red states in the border zones, hillbilly bastards who border on places like Afghanistan and who are bigtime islamic freaks.

The educated Liberals run the military, and at the end of the day the military run Pakistan, it's a lot like Turkey.


As long as they can keep those red-stater inbred religious hillbilly fucks at bay then they'll be fine.


In some respects the Pakistani civil war aint started yet, like you had your war in 1861-1865 and we had ours in 1642-1651 and 1745 with the hillbillies.

The US media has already taken the piss out of Americans with the information smokescreen run up to the Iraq war, if you guys aint ever going to be capable of reading between the lines of bias then the media is going to be taking the piss out of you until you fucking die.

Even the BBC sucks nowadays, but people have the internet.
Use the internet. Learn.


"we had ours in 1642-1651 and 1745 with the hillbillies."

One of the most talked about wars in my family when I was young.
When I graduated college I went to Britain and visited Prestonpons where we won and Culloden Moor where we wwere slaughtered. Checked out
the Cameron's mass grave of my ancestors. Cannon and fodder will overcome claymore & spear all the time. One thing about Charles Stuart the younger.

All his life, all that was worth living was spent during his one single year in the highlands.
 

bushman
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There are 3 or four major hillbilly areas in the world.

The highlands of Scotland
(now sorted after the genocide of the post 1745 clearances)

The Balkans.
Even Hitler never conquered that place during 1939-45.
The Balkans actually held up the invasion of Russia by six weeks, which came in handy at the gates of Moscow in December 1941 when Adolf ran out of time to achieve his final victory in Russia.

And the Afghanistan region of Asia, which has a 2000 year history of defeated foreign invaders.

Religion is irrelevant, these regions are/were populated by tribal rebels who will fight anyone who tries to impose an alien culture upon them.

If you want to win in these places then you have to exterminate the indigenous population, as the english did with the Scots in the Highlands of Scotland.
 

bushman
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I mean does mr "chief foreign correspondent for NBC" even make the slightest reference to India in his crummy US-centric "report on Pakistan" ?

If Pakistan gets out of hand then one billion Hindus with inflict carnage on that entire region, and half a dozen crappy Pakistani nukes won't stop the Hindu steamroller from squashing the place flat.
 
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the bear is back biatches!! printing cancel....
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these authors don't have joo names eekster :)

-------------------------------------------

No denying it: It's war in Pakistan
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
October 2, 2008

PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN -- War has come to Pakistan, not just as terrorist bombings, but as full-scale battles, leaving Pakistanis angry and dismayed as the dead, wounded and displaced turn up right on their doorsteps.

An estimated 250,000 people have now fled the gunship helicopters, jets, artillery and mortar fire of the Pakistani Army, and the assaults, intimidation and rough justice of the Taliban fighters who have dug into Pakistan's tribal areas.

About 20,000 people are so desperate they have flooded over the border from the Bajur tribal area to seek safety in war-torn Afghanistan.

Many others are crowding around the city of Peshawar, in northwest Pakistan, where staff members from the U.N. refugee agency help at nearly a dozen camps.

The International Committee of the Red Cross flew in a special surgical team from abroad last week to work alongside Pakistani doctors to help treat the wounded in two hospitals. "This is now a war zone," said Marco Succi, a Red Cross spokesman.

Not since Pakistan forged an alliance with the United States after 9/11 has the Pakistani Army fought its own people on such a scale and so close to a major city. After years of relative passivity, the army is now engaged in heavy fighting with the militants on at least three fronts.

The sudden engagement comes after months in which the United States had heaped criticism on Pakistan for not doing enough to take on the militants, and increasingly took matters into its own hands with drone strikes and even a raid by special operations forces in Pakistan's tribal areas.

But the army campaign has also unfolded as the Taliban has encroached deeper into Pakistan and carried out far bolder terrorist attacks, like the Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad last month. The attacks have generated high anxiety among the political, business and diplomatic elite.

In early August, goaded by the U.S. complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al-Qaida that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of Pakistan's military, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, opened the war front in Bajur, a Taliban and Al-Qaida stronghold along the Afghan border.

The military was already locked in an uphill fight against the militants in Swat, a more settled area of North West Frontier Province that was once a middle-class ski resort. "Swat is a place of hell," said Wajid Ali Khan, a minister in the provincial government who has taken refuge in Peshawar.

On a third front, south of Peshawar around the town of Dera Adam Khel, the army recently recaptured from Taliban control the strategic Kohat Tunnel, a roadway more than a mile long that carries NATO supplies from the port of Karachi to the coalition forces in Afghanistan.

The one hope in the gloom of war, said civilians and law enforcement officials, has been the formation by tribal leaders of small private armies, known in the region as lashkars.

They have traditionally served as a way of dealing with squabbles in Pakistan's tribal society but are now being formed in some cases to stand up to the Taliban.

But whether the fervor of the tribesmen and their ancient equipment can be a match for the ideological zeal, modern weaponry and sophisticated tactics of the Taliban is an open question.
 

bushman
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As I said, the Pakistani elite know Pakistan is fooked if they lose control.

America has been making moves to keep India out of any military action, because if India makes a move China and Russia may try to get involved in one way or another, and things could get complicated quick.

Thursday, 2 October 2008 08:33 UK
Indian joy over US nuclear deal
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7647689.stm

A nice wee deal where India gets civilian nuke help, no-one inspects their nuclear arsenal and they don't have to sign up to the NPT.
How good? As good a deal as Israel has ever got, thats how good.
:drink:

America will have told Pakistan -through unofficial channels- that if there's a risk of the islamic hillbillies getting close to Pakistans nuclear stuff then uncle sam will bomb every part of Pakistans nuclear kit back to the stone age.

Pakistan is actually fighting for her existence.
 

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