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

The Tribal Warriors
hiding places for bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. It
was the first time that Pakistani forces had set foot on the fiercely
autonomous territory. The 5,000-square-kilometre swathe was the
largest of seven tribal agencies on Pakistan’s western border with
Afghanistan. Inhabited by one million fiercely independent Pashtun
tribesmen, Waziristan was a land of high, difficult mountains and deep,
rugged defiles. With its long porous border with Afghanistan’s Paktia
and Khost provinces, Waziristan had become a major trouble spot for
US and Afghan forces, particularly as Taliban insurgents escaped to
the Pakistani side after attacking coalition posts.
The treacherous, inhospitable mountainous region, which had
been used by the American CIA and the Pakistani ISI in the 1980s as a
base for their covert operation against the Soviet occupation forces in
Afghanistan, had been turned by al-Qaeda-linked militants into a base
for the battle against their erstwhile patrons. The strategically located
border region was used as a launching pad for the mujahidin into
Afghanistan during the Afghan jihad. For the hundreds of anti-Soviet
fighters, trained and funded by Pakistani and American intelligence
agencies, the terrain was not unfamiliar. Many of the Arab fighters
had stayed back in the area after the end of the anti-Soviet war in
1990. Some of them had also married into local tribes and so were not
seen as aliens by the residents. But it was only after the ousting of the
Taliban regime by US forces that the ideological bond between the
locals and the foreign fighters turned into a real relationship. When
bin Laden and several top associates escaped US bombing raids and
an Afghan-led ground assault on the mountain complex at Tora Bora 2
in December 2001, up to 2,000 al-Qaeda fighters crossed into the
Pakistani tribal area through difficult mountain passes, many of them
ending up in Waziristan. It was widely suspected that bin Laden and
al-Zawahiri were also among them. Hundreds of militants fleeing the
US bombing were captured or killed by Pakistani security forces while
trying to move to other parts of Pakistan or to other countries. Many
others were captured by the tribesmen and sold to the CIA for a hefty
bounty ranging from $3000 to $25,000. Most of these detainees later
landed in the American prison at Guantanamo Bay. 3
For more than two years al-Qaeda fugitives had moved freely,
turning the border areas into a new base for their operations. Clusters
of towering mud compounds in a valley surrounded by rugged
mountains close to the Afghan border served as the world’s largest
al-Qaeda command and control centre, as well as a guerrilla training
1