Baitullah Mehsud, icon of Pakistani terrorism, is gone. His spokesman Maulvi Omar sits in jail after a tribal lashkar or army delivered him to the military on August 18. The fate of two of Mehsud’s potential successors - Hakimullah Mehsud and Maulvi Fazlullah of the Swat region is still shrouded in mystery. Two of Baitullah’s second-tier commanders were arrested from near Islamabad and Rawalpindi around August 16. And the avowed enemy of the Pakistani security establishment - the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that Mehsud cobbled together in December 2007 - apparently stands in disarray. Hakimullah appears to have won the vicious contest for succession and the militants, too, have accepted him as the new emir. But Hakimullah’s silence suggests the TTP is still struggling to recover from the shock elimination of its supreme leader, Baitullah Mehsud. It is also not certain if Hakimullah himself is alive, or his lookalike brother is presented as the new chief to prevent further fissures within the TTP.
So what does this mean? A terminal blow to the militant forces entrenched in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) region? Does it mean Pakistan can reclaim these regions from men who adore Osama bin Laden and abhor the US and its allies? Will the Pakistani government be able to cleanse the area of militants and follow through on promises of effecting good governance and instilling a sense of political participation among FATA’s four million inhabitants? FATA’s people currently chafe under the draconian 1901 Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), which advocates collective punishment and has been described by some activists as human rights abuse by the state.
http://newageislam.com/drain-pakistan-s-tribal-swamps/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1758
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11:35 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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