May 8,2008:
Negotiations continue, after five
weeks, between the Pakistani government and tribal leaders regarding what to do
with the Taliban and al Qaeda activities along the Afghan border. The tribes
are demanding that there can be no deal unless army garrisons are withdrawn
from the tribal areas. The government refuses, because deals with the tribes
have fallen apart before, and then the army had to fight its way into the
tribal areas, taking hundreds of casualties in the process. Meanwhile, the
Taliban in Pakistan have issued a number of threats regarding lifestyle. Men must
wear beards, girls must not go to non-religious schools, no ring tones on cell
phones, no videos or music. Newspapers must not show "un-Islamic" pictures of
women, and so on. This sort of thing is not popular with most of the tribal
population.
Meanwhile,
the tribes and Taliban show their lack of discipline and reliability with a
growing number of terror attacks. These include several suicide bomb attacks recently,
plus gunfire directed at army check points, and a nighttime arson attack on a
girls school in the Swat valley. The government sees this as a deliberate
intimidation campaign. After all, the government would not be negotiating with
the terrorists had not some one thousand people been killed by terrorist
attacks in the last 14 months.
The new
government has ordered the civilian intelligence agencies to now report to the
prime minister, while military intelligence still reports to the head of the
military. The military used to control nearly all the intelligence operations. The
intelligence agencies have been responsible for a lot of the tolerance for
Islamic terrorism in Pakistan, and the United States and Europe are pressuring
Pakistan to shut down Islamic militant operations in the tribal regions along
the border. As part of this pressure, the United States is withholding military
aid to Pakistan. Most of that aid is for military forces directed at India, not
Islamic militants.
India is
organizing more local militias to enable villages to protect themselves from
Maoist control. While the Maoists are popular in many areas, some of the
Maoists operate like local dictators, and are not popular at all. Another
problem is that the Maoists often try to take over local government by
threatening and intimidating local officials. These bureaucrats welcome local
militias to prevent them from getting caught between Maoist threats and
government obligations.
May 3,
2008: A typhoon hit Myanmar over the
weekend. The military government had not established an early warning system,
and people in the coastal farming areas of the Irrawaddy river delta, were surprised
when hit by enormous tidal surges. The flooding left millions homeless and
killed over 100,000. Much of the southern part of the country lost electric
power for a while. It took the isolationist government several days before it
agreed to accept foreign aid. Events like this are sometimes the first step in
the destruction of dictatorial governments.
