Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak

1 Frontline Pakistan
from US custody in March 2004. His long hair and daredevil exploits
had earned him notoriety, and he had become a hero for anti-US
fighters active in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Abdullah had turned to militancy after failing to obtain a commission
in Pakistan’s army in the early 1990s. Many of his relatives and an
uncle were army officers and it was his life-long passion to follow in
their footsteps. A dejected man, he went to join the Taliban forces in
Afghanistan. The two and a half years he had spent at Guantanamo
prison further radicalized him, and he became one of the most hunted
guerrillas of the military operation.
Abdullah had fled just before the troops arrived in a village on a
mountaintop some ten miles from the Afghan border. 1 The stoutwalled
mud-brick compound where he once lived looked much the
same as any dwelling in Pakistan’s mountainous hinterland, with
firewood stacked neatly outside in preparation for the approaching
winter. The fort-like sprawling structure also served as his operation
headquarters. Inside, there was a stockpile of heavy machine guns,
rocket-propelled grenades and bomb-making equipment. A visibly
frustrated General Khattak blamed the US authorities for not carrying
out a thorough investigation before freeing Abdullah. ‘In hindsight it
was a major blunder,’ declared the General. The literature and material
recovered from the compound showed that al-Qaeda leaders
had been operating from the area, but had probably escaped to some
other part of the country.
Despite some military success, the bloody war in this treacherous
mountainous terrain was far from over. Guerrilla forces had scattered
and continued to ambush government forces. ‘It is a deadly war
where we are fighting an invisible enemy,’ said an officer who had
been involved in the fighting for the previous six months. ‘We never
know where the next bullet is coming from.’ But the greatest cause for
frustration for General Khattak and his officers was that there was no
sign of the man that Pakistan’s American allies in the war on terror really
wanted him to catch: Osama bin Laden. ‘I have had no indications, no
intelligence of bin Laden’s whereabouts,’ Khattak declared.
This was November 2004, almost eight months since General
Khattak, along with more than 7,000 troops, had started the hunt
operation against al-Qaeda fugitives in the lawless tribal region. It was
the largest operation since Pakistan had thrown its support behind
the US campaign in Afghanistan after 9/11. Known as Pakistan’s wild
west, Waziristan had long been regarded as one of the most likely