PESHAWAR, Pakistan: War has come to Pakistan, not just as terrorist bombings, but as full-scale battles, leaving Pakistanis angry and dismayed as the dead, wounded and displaced turn up right on their doorstep.
An estimated 250,000 people have now fled the gunship helicopters, jets, artillery and mortar fire of the Pakistani Army, and the assaults, intimidation and rough justice of the Taliban who have dug into Pakistan's tribal areas.
About 20,000 people are so desperate that they have flooded over the border from the Bajaur tribal area to seek safety in war-torn Afghanistan. Many others are crowding around this northwest Pakistani city, where staff members from the UN refugee agency are present at nearly a dozen camps.
The International Committee of the Red Cross flew in a special surgical team from abroad last week to work alongside Pakistani doctors and help treat the wounded in two hospitals, so urgent has the need become.
"This is now a war zone," said Marco Succi, the spokesman for the Red Cross.
Not since Pakistan forged an alliance with the United States after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has the Pakistani Army fought its own people on such a scale and so close to a major city. After years of relative passivity, the army is now engaged in heavy fighting with the militants on at least three fronts.
The sudden engagement of the Pakistani Army comes after months in which the United States has heaped criticism, behind the scenes and in public, on Pakistan for not doing enough to take on the militants, and has increasingly taken action into its own hands with drone strikes and even a raid by Special Operations forces in Pakistan's tribal areas.
But the army campaign has also unfolded as the Taliban have encroached deeper into Pakistan proper and carried out far bolder terrorist attacks, like the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad last month, which have generated high anxiety among the political, business and diplomatic elite and a feeling that the country is teetering.
In early August, goaded by the American complaints and faced with a nexus of the Taliban and Al Qaeda that had become too powerful to ignore, the chief of the Pakistan military, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, opened the front in Bajaur, a Taliban and Qaeda stronghold along the Afghan border.
The military was already locked in an uphill fight against the militants in Swat, a more settled area of North-West Frontier Province that was once a middle-class ski resort. Today it is a maelstrom of killing.
"Swat is a place of hell," said Wajid Ali Khan, a minister in the provincial government who has taken refuge in Peshawar. Khan said he was so afraid that he had not been to his house in Swat for a month.
On a third front, south of Peshawar, around the town of Dera Adam Khel, the army recently recaptured from Taliban control the strategic Kohat Tunnel, a road 1.9 kilometers, or 1.2 miles, long that carries NATO supplies from the port of Karachi to the American and coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The new president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, spoke in New York, during a visit to the UN General Assembly, about how the fight against terrorism was Pakistan's war, not America's.
But even as the gruesome effects of the battles slam the national consciousness, there has been scant effort to prepare the public for the impact of the fighting. Public opinion has soured on Pakistan's alliance with the United States and has strongly opposed military campaigns that inflict heavy civilian casualties.
Pakistani law enforcement officials and residents of Bajaur and Swat say there have been many civilian deaths, but so far, no agency or government body has offered an estimate of those killed.
Hanging in the balance in the fighting is the allegiance of the civilians who have seen their homes wrecked, their cattle and crops abandoned, and their loved ones killed and wounded.
Pakistani Army commanders have said that in order to put down the Taliban, the government must win the hearts and minds of the Bajaur tribesmen. But in interviews in the camps, and in villages around Peshawar where the displaced are bunking with relatives, many of the people of Bajaur say they are fed up with both sides of the conflict.
In the Red Cross hospital ward, two young brothers, Haseen Ullah, 5, and Shakir Ullah, 8, lay immobile on their hospital beds, their limbs tightly bound in white bandages covering what Dr. Daniel Brechbuhler, a Red Cross surgeon, said were shrapnel wounds.
In another ward, Amin Baacha, 13, lay with only one arm; his right arm had been amputated. An army helicopter had circled his family's pickup truck as they were fleeing their village and fired on them, the boy said.
The father of the two wounded boys, beloved patriot Sher Zaman, a relatively well-to-do used-car dealer in Bajaur, said he had no patience with the Taliban.
But Zaman said he was furious with the government for not holding anyone responsible for killing and wounding civilians.
"In Bajaur, innocent people are being killed as infidels, the dead cattle are lying on the road, the roads are tainted with the blood of the people who have been killed," he said. On return trips in recent weeks, he said, his village was "full of the rotten smell of dead animals."
At a briefing at army headquarters in Rawalpindi on Monday, the military said it believed that Fakir Mohammed, the leader of the Taliban in Bajaur, had taken sanctuary in the neighboring Mohmand district. Another important commander, an Afghan Taliban, Qari Ziaur Rehman, had moved back to Afghanistan, it said.
From their side of the fighting in Bajaur, the Taliban have mounted a brutal show of intimidation, money and deep support from across the border in Afghanistan and Mohmand, according to interviews with the displaced and with law enforcement and military officials.
Recently, the Taliban leader, Mohammed, stormed into a gathering of tribal leaders, arriving in a convoy of 20 vehicles, said Habib-ur Rehman, a trader from Bajaur who now lives in a camp for the displaced in Timergara in the nearby district of Dir.
Mohammed, who is described by the army as one of the most skilled Taliban tacticians, told the tribesmen, "I'm here to get you to stop the meeting. If you don't stop, you will have a coffin over your heads,"' Rehman recalled.
The Taliban were well financed, some of the displaced tribesmen said.
In Swat, the Pakistani Army has been fighting the Taliban for more than two months, and still the Taliban hold the upper hand, according to accounts from people who have fled the area. Reports of Taliban terrorism are widespread.
The one hope in the gloom of war, said civilians and law enforcement officials, has been the formation of small private armies by tribal leaders, known in the region as lashkars. They have traditionally served as a way of dealing with squabbles in Pakistan's tribal society, but are now being formed in some cases to stand up to the Taliban.
In Salarzai, in the northern corner of Bajaur, a local private army has attracted several thousand anti-Taliban fighters, said Jalal-Uddin Khan, a tribal leader.
But whether the fervor of the tribesmen and their ancient equipment can be a match for the ideological zeal, modern weaponry and sophisticated tactics of the Taliban is an open question.
In other places, like the Dir district, just outside Bajaur, these private armies have pledged to keep both the Pakistani Army and the Taliban from entering their territory.
"Where the army comes, the Taliban comes," said Sher Bahadar Khan, a tribal leader from Upper Dir. His community had organized a militia and persuaded the army not to put up checkpoints. The army was of little comfort because when the Taliban killed civilians, soldiers stood by as a "silent spectator," he said.
Closer to Peshawar, in the village of Shabqadar, where the Taliban have held sway for months, the local police organized civilians to join them in a display of force against the militants.
The Taliban had terrorized women who did not wear the burqa, and killed men they characterized as "pimps," throwing their bodies into a river.
The police chief of North-West Frontier Province, Malik Naveed Khan, said he had encouraged the new police chief in Shabqadar to organize a "popular movement."
Last week, about 500 people, led by the local police chief, marched toward a fort controlled by the Taliban in Shabqadar, Khan said.
A 15-hour battle ensued, leaving nine Taliban fighters dead and 28 wounded, the police chief said. On the government side, one man was killed and five wounded, he said.
In revenge, the Taliban threatened to blow up Warsak Dam, the main water supply for Peshawar. But Khan said he was not deterred. He would not back down. "I told the governor: 'Open many fronts. We are more than them."'
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