Pakistan Begins Ground Offensive

Following a series of Taliban and militant attacks the Pakistan army has been laying the ground work for this offensive for some time now. It appears the ground offensive has begun:

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan's army began on Saturday a ground operation against Taliban militants in the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border after weeks of air and artillery strikes, a senior government official said.

In a show of unity in advance of the ground offensive, government and political party leaders gave the military full backing on Friday, vowing to weed out militants and restore the writ of the state."The ground operation has begun," Tariq Hayat Khan, secretary of Pakistan's ethnic Pashtun tribal regions, told Reuters by telephone.

He gave no details and military spokesmen were unavailable for comment.The army says about 28,000 soldiers are in place to take on an estimated 10,000 hard-core Taliban. About 500 commandos arrived in the region on Friday, security officials said.

Considering the success of the last operation, there are high hopes for this one as the Pakistani army prepares to break up the terror rings that have dominate South Waziristan:

The army is now planning a ground attack on the Mehsud militants. The terrain is forbidding and, with the winter snows expected next month, so is the weather. The Mehsud Taliban also seem to be in better shape than the army had hoped.

Their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in August by an American drone. He was also the supreme commander of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, an alliance of 13 Pushtun Taliban groups of which he had been a founder. On his death a leadership battle ensued, motivated, the army claims, by his lieutenants’ desire to lay hands on a vast fortune that their dead “emir” had accrued by extortion and foreign donations. A 28-year-old militant, Hakimullah Mehsud, allegedly al-Qaeda’s favourite and a cousin of Qari Hussain, was declared his successor. But, until this month, when video footage of him was televised, he was thought by foreign and local spies to have been killed in a fight with his chief rival, Waliur Rehman. Some reports said Mr Rehman, who had been put in charge of South Waziristan, was also dead. But he was heard on a telephone intercept on October 11th exhorting a follower to pray for success in the Rawalpindi attack.

In another sign of the Taliban’s resilience, the army has had limited success trying to divide them. The leader of a rival Mehsud Taliban militia, supported by the army, was killed by the genuine article in June. Having no popular support, its fighters are locked down in Dera Ismail Khan under army protection.The army seems to have done better in buying off the Taliban belonging to other tribes. To help keep the Mehsud fighters out of NWFP, it has armed militants of the small Bhittani tribe, despised by the Mehsud. It also seems confident that it can ensure the neutrality of two powerful Taliban commanders of the Wazir tribe, Mullah Nazir, who controls most of the rest of South Waziristan, and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, in neighbouring North Waziristan.

Look at the map and note how close Kabul is to the region, these battles are totally connected to the US operation and the survival of the Afghan government.