Pakistan army is issuing regular briefing that it has killed so many taliban everyday. How come ? They still seem to have no control over Buner, Malakand and Swat ? There are reports of endless artillery bombardments, air strikes, helicopter strikes, use of tanks and so on. And still at the end of day, despite displacing millions of people they have no control over these areas.
The answer is the strategy being applied by Pakistan army is totally wrong. Pakistan army do not need a direct and total reliance on heavey artillary and bombings. Pakistan army may be big in numbers but it is not smart. Being not smart means that they even don't know how to effectively use numeric superiority on their territory.
What Pakistan army needs is numbers to take control of every village, every road, every street and every mountain pass. They have to go to every house, assure protection to their people and find out about Taliban. They have to deny operational space to taliban. Taliban can be taken out without displacing people , but this is only possible if Pakistan army has guts to link up its own people. Pakistan army also has to demonstrate better understanding and capability of its own land.
Unfortunately, at present Pakistan army has failed to demonstrate willingness to link up with its own people in Swat and other areas, it has demonstrated poor knowledge of its own terrain(villages, mountains, streets) and it has been totally unsympathetic towards its own people. People hate Taliban, but ruthless bombings being employed by Pakistan army ensures that they start hating Pakistan even more.
For God sake, we need an intelligent counter insurgency strategy based on capture, control and link up with our own people. Once we start controlling ground, only then we will be able to get ground intelligence and be able to take out taliban leadership and footsoldiers. People hate Taliban so much that there is open and publicly available man to man intelligence on these people, but somehow our mighty army and intelligence agencies don't see it. Perhaps this is because our generals, politicians and bureaucracy needs strong grounds for getting hold of American dollars and they are not interested in protecting their own people. Also the children and wealth of our top leadership down upto bureacrats is in America and Europe and they are not bothered when ordinary Pakistanis suffer.
