Musharraf Widens The War

Hugh Hewitt: Musharraf Widens The War

"Last week soldiers sealed all the roads into Miran Shah, the provincial
capital, occupied the hills around it and fired the first artillery salvo in
what Musharraf’s many critics have called a war on his own people.
On Friday
morning the army moved into parts of Miran Shah itself after militants blew up
government buildings overnight. Most of the 60,000 townspeople are feared
trapped, but hundreds of families have fled their mud homes in villages nearby
and headed east for the sanctuary of Bannu, a town in the neighbouring North
West Frontier province.
I watched last week as some of the 80,000 troops deployed in Waziristan dug in alongside the highway outside Mirali, a small town 10 miles east of Miran Shah. Almost all the checkpoints on this stretch of narrow road were empty. Three lay in rubble because the militants had blown them up. No troops drove along the road. They shuttled to the nearby Afghan border by helicopter."

If this is an honest move by Musharraf to take on the militants in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, that is good news for America. The government of Pakistan attempted the best it could to reach a peace deal with the tribes, and I think that we should all learn from their example. That you just cannot make deals with terrorists, it doesn't work. If the Pakistani Army is going to seriously go after the terrorists that have taken to hiding in the loosely governed areas of Pakistan, and push them out, it could be a strong blog against Al Qaeda. They have been eliminated as a major force in Iraq, and they are losing strength inside Afghanistan, much of their strength there comes from being able to retreat to Pakistan. Taking away their final hiding place could mean the end to Al Qaeda as a group.

Note it is the end of it as a group, the war against terror is larger than Al Qaeda, while other groups might begin to fold the same way that one by one the countries of the Eastern Block fell, they could continue. Many of the new terror cells are loosely aligned to Al Qaeda and not clearly dependent on them for leadership or resources.