Waziristan [No Relation] Gets Adjusted

The North Waziristan Attitude Adjustment

"This change in attitude is another side effect of the Pakistani military operations in North Waziristan. This has been going on since mid-2014 and has allowed the army to examine a lot of mosques and religious schools (madrasas) that had long been off-limits to the security forces. What was found was ample evidence that many mosques and most madrasas were basically part of an extensive Islamic terrorist infrastructure. The madrasas not only indoctrinated Moslem boys to be Islamic terrorists but took those who agreed to be killers and trained them. Mosques and madrasas were also found to have hidden (at least from public view) rooms for storing weapons, building bombs, training Islamic terrorists and housing veteran (but wanted) Islamic terrorists. In other words, what was found in North Waziristan changed minds among Pakistani officers who were either neutral on Islamic terrorism (at least when it was outside Pakistan) or enthusiastic supporters. There were also a lot of documents captured in these Islamic terrorist hideouts and hundreds of Islamic terrorists were captured and talked. So did many local civilians who had long been silent because the Islamic terrorists executed (or worse) informers. All this evidence said the same thing; the Islamic terrorists were far more powerful and numerous than thought and many of them were willing to destroy Pakistan in an effort to turn the country into a religious dictatorship.

This attitude adjustment also led to Pakistani officials admitting that they had provided sanctuary for the Afghan Taliban since 2002. This has long been common knowledge but until recently no one in the Pakistani government would admit it. This new openness was also facilitated by revelations that most of the civilians in North Waziristan, when allowed to give an honest opinion, said they backed the American use of UAVs to find and kill Islamic terrorist leaders. While this sometimes caused civilian casualties it mainly hurt the Islamic terrorists and civilians quietly approved of this. Some even risked their lives to provide targeting information for these UAV attacks. The same thing happened in Afghanistan, where U.S. officers were often approached by tribal leaders asking for more aerial efforts to find and attack Islamic terrorists. In Afghanistan it was widely known that over 80 percent of civilian casualties were from Taliban violence, which was often used to force civilians to support the Islamic terrorists or to punish real or imagined government informants. Since the Taliban worked closely with the drug gangs (which were very unpopular in Afghanistan) there was a lot of popular hostility towards Islamic terrorists in general. But in both countries the Islamic terrorists could bribe or intimidate the mass media to play down this lack of popular support and make more noise about American missiles killing innocent civilians."