The village that fought Taliban

Four months ago, the people of the Pakistani mountain village of Shalbandi gained national repute after a village posse hunted down and killed six Taliban fighters who had tied up and killed eight local policemen.

On Sunday morning the Taliban struck back.

A suicide bomber exploded a car at a school in Shalbandi that was serving as a polling place, as voters lined up to elect a representative to the national assembly. More than 30 people were killed and more than two dozen wounded, according to local political and security officials.

The blast was the latest demonstration of the Taliban's bloody encroachment from lawless tribal areas on the western border eastward and deeper into Pakistan. Shalbandi is less than 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, northwest of Islamabad, the capital, and lies just south of the lush Swat Valley, which has been largely taken over by the Taliban despite large-scale army operations.

In the frenzied aftermath of the car bombing, survivors and witnesses described two versions of the attack, said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, Information Minister for the North-West Frontier Province.

In one account, he said, the bomber sped his car toward the school but plowed into adjacent shops. The explosion was so large that it destroyed part of the school and killed many people waiting to vote. In the other version, he said, the killer parked near the school and told people he was having car trouble. As people gathered, he detonated the bomb inside.

A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the attack as retribution for the deaths of its fighters, according to a Pakistani news channel. The Pakistani military claimed over the weekend it had killed 34 militants in Swat.

But to people in the region there was no doubt why militants picked Shalbandi for such a gruesome attack.

"They singled out this village because it had clearly resisted and had expelled the Taliban by force," said Afrasiab Khattak, leader of the Awami National Party, which won control of the provincial government in February by defeating incumbent religious parties with ties to militants. "They want to topple the system and turn this country into a failed state."

Shalbandi had received constant threats after the posse hunted down the Taliban. "Disrupting elections is a general strategy for these elements," Khattak said, "but there was a reason for choosing this specific village."

The bombing on Sunday was not the first act of retaliation. The son of a village elder who had been a leader of the August posse was recently kidnapped by militants in Swat, Hussain said. The village elder responded by kidnapping the son of a well-known Taliban spokesman in Swat.

"These people cannot frighten us," said Hussain, who added that voting for the legislative seat continued Sunday at other polling places. "We are ready for a dialogue, but if they continue with the violence we will take strong action against them even at the cost of our lives."

Yet the efforts of villagers in northwest Pakistan have proved little deterrent to the Taliban, who continue to take over more territory despite major Pakistani military campaigns. In the latest sign of Taliban domination of Swat, militants announced that by Jan. 15 no girls would allowed to attend school in the valley.

One of Pakistan's leading newspapers, Dawn, editorialized on Sunday that the army "just cannot afford to redeploy any large number of its troops" and thus leave "the 'wild' west in a free fall." "Isn't that the area where the world's best intelligence says the extremist militants are holed up in significant numbers and planning to strike targets everywhere?" the editorial asked.

On the other hand, there is some angst within the Pakistani defense and intelligence communities that the military's scorched-earth approach in the west, including leveling villages as refugees huddle in camps miles away, may not gain the government much security in the long run. "What do they gain if they destroy everything?" said one Pakistani official familiar with the military campaigns.

Source: IHT