Sometimes you do get what you want. The U.S. government had been strongly pressuring Pakistan to take direct military action against the Taliban, which had come to dominate in some non-border areas, including areas not far in miles from Peshawar and Islamabad.
As a result, the Pakistan Army has mobilized formidable power against the militants in the Buner and Swat districts. Both are in the NWFP province, but neither are border areas. In the fighting thus far, estimates are that about 1000 militants have already been killed. No one has an estimate of the number of civilians killed because, as usual, the press are banned from the area.
In the meanwhile, there are now 1.5 million civilians who have fled those areas now living in relief camps, according to estimates from the UNHCR:
The announcement of further aid came as the Office of Antonio Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), announced that the number of registered refugees since May 2 had reached 1,454,377.
A statement from UNHCR said that “humanitarian workers were struggling to keep up with the size and speed of the displacement”.
Guterres told reporters on Sunday, “It’s like trying to catch something that’s moving ahead of us because the number of people on the move every day is so big and the response is never enough.” “Leaving this population without the support they need - with such massive numbers - could constitute an enormous destabilizing factor”, he said.
UNHCR’s chief spokesperson, Ron Redmond, said on Tuesday, “We haven’t seen anything so big and so fast in years.” (link)
And when they say, “We haven’t seen anything so big and so fast in years,” they mean 15 years, to be exact. As I understand it, the last time a displacement of this magnitude happened was 1994, in Rwanda.
You break it, you own it. In recent years, the U.S. has proven very effective at breaking it, but ineffective (probably by design) at owning it. Here, the Pakistani army is probably doing the right thing by forcing this show-down*, and the U.S. government probably did the right thing to make them do it.
But now we own it. The U.S. is pledging $110 million in humanitarian aid for the displaced people — good. Let’s hope that money reaches its destination. I’m also hoping this fight ends very soon, so the displaced people can go back to their farms, harvest their wheat, and feed themselves this winter.
(*) A qualification: As President Obama acknowledged a few weeks ago, it may be that the government of Pakistan is in this mess partly because, for all sorts of reasons, it has been failing to win the ‘soft’ (media and PR) war on Islamism in NWFP. I talked about one facet of that problem in an earlier post here.
