Pakistan terrorists target more civilians in 2009

New report says Islamist militant strikes in Pakistan rose 45 percent in 2009, with a total of 2,586 attacks. Eighty-seven of the terrorist attacks were suicide bombers. As the year ended, more of the attacks targeted civilians.

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The current extremist campaign in Pakistan started in summer 2007, after the military stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad, a radical stronghold, and killed some 100 people holed up inside, an event that Al Qaeda seized upon to call for an Islamist rebellion in the country. That insurrection led to the formation of a Pakistani Taliban movement that fought not in Afghanistan but at home, and that linked up with older militant groups in the country.

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The study found that a total of 25,447 people, including extremists, were killed and injured in militancy-related violence in Pakistan last year, eclipsing 8,812 such casualties in Afghanistan. In comparison, at the height of the violence in Iraq four years ago, some 3,000 Iraqis were dying each month.

In 2009, for the first time, after Pakistani Taliban took over the Swat valley in the northwest, public opinion turned against the extremists' claim that they were fighting for Islam. That allowed Pakistani forces to launch operations in Swat, and also later in South Waziristan on the Afghan border.
Washington is now pressing Pakistan to send its forces into North Waziristan, a refuge for Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

Pakistani officials have pleaded repeatedly that they can't open too many fronts simultaneously, with ongoing commitments in Swat, South Waziristan, other parts of the tribal area, as well as needing to guard Pakistan's eastern border with archenemy India.

Some US military and intelligence officials think their top Pakistani counterparts remain unwilling take on some of the Islamists. The Pakistani army, they note, has been close to certain extremist groups, including two major Afghan insurgent groups led by Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

"There is now a broad realization that militancy as a tool of policy cannot work," said Zahid Hussain, an analyst and author of Frontline Pakistan. "This is going to be a prolonged war."
(Shah is a McClatchy special correspondent.)