Pakistan invades Pakistan. Air strikes for now, ground invasion is next...

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ISLAMABAD: After months of dithering, Pakistan's army has launched an offensive against Taliban insurgents near the border with Afghanistan but the tough terrain, a potentially hostile local population and the possibility of revenge attacks in heartland cities could be more difficult to conquer than the militants.

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No single outside force has ever succeeded in subduing the volatile ethnic Pashtun region straddling Pakistan's western frontier with Afghanistan, its deeply tribal population fiercely independent and opposed to any invading army.

The biggest setback may be far away from the battlefields of North Waziristan as the country braces for a wave of Taliban revenge attacks around Pakistan including in Punjab, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's political power base.

“The biggest challenge of this operation is that our success in the tribal areas could quickly turn into losses in the plains of Punjab,” a senior military official close to the operation told Reuters.

“Because there will be blowback and the public will get scared and Taliban sympathisers will come out and say 'we told you so'. And that's where we could lose this battle.”

“That is Nawaz Sharif's biggest challenge,” he added: “To convince the public that it's better to bleed once than to die slowly everyday.”

So far the army has resorted only to air strikes, sending F-16 and Mirage fighter jets to pound suspected militant hideouts up in the mountains in a strategy to disorient the Taliban and sow panic among their ranks.

According to a military official close to the operation, the ground offensive will start in the next week when land forces will try to comb through North Waziristan's valleys and take over villages and buildings.

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Pakistan's strategy, for now, is to encircle North Waziristan with troops and use helicopters and fighter jets to attack sanctuaries from the air.

Before it launches a ground offensive, the army has given the region's estimated two million population several days to evacuate the area, with a large number of refugees massing in a tent camp across the border in Afghanistan's Khost province, a potential humanitarian crisis in the making.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1113336