Pakistan has expelled a Ny Times reporter, apparently, for secretly and without permission travelling to tribal areas for his article called Next Gen Taliban. This is the link to his article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06PAKISTAN-t.html?ref=magazine
some of excerpts from the article:
Muhammad had told me in the fall of 2006 that the sole reason that the Taliban hadn’t defeated NATO forces in Afghanistan yet was because NATO had B-52’s, and when I reminded him of this, he smiled through a mouthful of missing teeth. “The Taliban have more than made up for that disadvantage now with suicide bombers,” he said.
In Quetta, Maulvi Noor Muhammad, who is 62, sat on the madrassa’s cold concrete floor wrapped in a wool blanket as he leafed through a newspaper. Speaking in Pashto through an interpreter, he said that Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the J.U.I. chief, had visited three times in the previous few weeks to persuade him to enter the election. Muhammad claimed to have refused each time because he believed the J.U.I. had drifted from its core mission: to lead an aggressive Islamization campaign and provide political support to what he referred to as the mujahedeen, a term for Muslim fighters that can shift in meaning depending on who is speaking. “Participating in this election would amount to treason against the mujahedeen,” he said.
Last April, a rocket whistled over the sugarcane fields that separate Rehman’s house from the main road before crashing into the veranda of his brother’s home next door. A few months later, Pakistani intelligence agencies discovered a hit list, drafted by the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, with Rehman’s name on it.
According to this past summer’s U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, approved by all 16 official intelligence agencies, Al Qaeda has regrouped in the Tribal Areas adjoining the province and may be planning an attack on the American homeland. “Everyone is afraid,” Akbari told me. “These mujahedeen don’t respect anyone anymore. They don’t even listen to each other. Maulana Fazlur Rehman is a moderate. He wants dialogue. But the Taliban see him as a hurdle to their ambitions. ”
Rehman doesn’t pretend to be a liberal; he wants to see Pakistan become a truly Islamic state. But the moral vigilantism and the proliferation of Taliban-inspired militias along the border with Afghanistan is not how he saw it happening. The emergence of Taliban-inspired groups in Pakistan has placed immense strain on the country’s Islamist community, a strain that may only increase with the assassination of Bhutto. As the rocket attack on Rehman’s house illustrates, the militant jihadis have even lashed out against the same Islamist parties who have coddled them in the past.
Western audiences might find news about Islamists fighting among themselves rather appealing. But jihadi wars, at least since the expulsion of the Soviets from Afghanistan, have tended to spill over borders, all the more so since Sept. 11, 2001. And within Pakistan, the struggle for supremacy between those Pakistani Islamists who want to gain power democratically and those who want to abolish democracy altogether could well tear the country apart.
Jihadis have, of course, increasingly opted to intervene in Pakistan by attacking mainstream politicians and their supporters. Only a week before Bhutto’s assassination, a suicide bomber targeted the former interior minister, leaving more than 50 people dead. It was the second attempt on the minister’s life; the first, in April, killed nearly 30 people. And of course Bhutto’s arrival home in October, after years abroad, was greeted by two suicide bombers who detonated themselves beside her float, killing about 140 people. In the aftermath of her killing, more violence seems inevitable. But the politics of terror and assassination are probably secondary, among jihadis, to the gradual extension of their control over rural and semiurban stretches of western Pakistan — a power base that, at least in the short term, can be disrupted only by the Pakistani military. Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban commander from South Waziristan who captured about 250 soldiers in August, recently warned a J.U.I. candidate there not to run unless several of his arrested Taliban fighters were released. More ominously, in mid-December, 40 representatives from different Taliban gangs from across the North-West Frontier Province and the Tribal Areas banded together into a single group, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (the Pakistani Taliban Movement). The movement named Mehsud their leader. He has also been named by Pakistani authorities as a suspect in Bhutto’s murder.
The sound of an explosion punctured an otherwise pleasant evening. I had been sitting under a giant mango tree, drinking Southern Comfort with a group of friends, including a midlevel intelligence officer in the army. It was my first night in Dera Ismail Khan, Rehman’s hometown in the North-West Frontier Province, about 100 miles from the Afghan border. While the blast jerked me upright, no one else seemed too bothered. Locals had grown used to the bangs and booms. The previous night, Pakistani Taliban bombed a music store in the town bazaar. The sound I heard was the explosion from a small grenade targeting the owner of a cable-TV service.
Musharraf’s government says the increasingly frequent bombings are evidence of Talibanization creeping east from the Afghanistan border. The local Taliban militants blast shops selling un-Islamic CDs, cable-TV operators, massage parlors and other sites they consider havens of vice. A newspaper editor in Dera Ismail Khan showed me a letter he received, signed by the Taliban, warning him not to print anything that defamed the mujahedeen. They threatened to blow up his office if he didn’t comply.
Rehman’s critics blame him and his party for facilitating the local Taliban, an allegation he resents. “We are politicians, and we will have to go to our constituencies to get votes in an election,” …“But even we are now afraid of the young men fighting.”
Since Ghazi’s death, hundreds of soldiers and policemen have died in suicide blasts or in gunfights against the Taliban. The capture of the soldiers in South Waziristan has perhaps been the worst of it. (In a Taliban-produced DVD circulating around Dera Ismail Khan, a teenager saws the head off a soldier while, in the background, three of his adolescent peers chant “Allahu akbar.”) But the militants have not spared Pakistan’s top spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.), which orchestrated the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s. In September, twin suicide blasts went off, and one ripped through a bus carrying I.S.I. employees to work in Rawalpindi, the military’s garrison city near Islamabad, killing at least 25 people. The intelligence officer I met in Dera Ismail Khan, whose area of operations included the Taliban-ruled enclave of South Waziristan, maintains that his contacts with the militants were severed long ago. “We can hardly work there anymore,” he told me. “The Taliban suspect everyone of spying. All of our sources have been slaughtered.”
Even after the Bhutto assassination, Rehman told me he would stay in the election — although, as he put it, “the reality is that this is complete anarchy, and no one can run a campaign.”
By the time I returned in October, I was the only guest. Almost immediately after arriving the second time around, I saw why: at the edge of town, Taliban rode around in flatbed trucks, pointing weapons in the air and ordering motorists to remove the tape decks from their cars. Fazlullah, like his Taliban predecessors in Afghanistan, deemed music — and anything that plays music — un-Islamic.
The following Friday, I went to Imam Dehri, where I met the commander of Fazlullah’s militia, a man with glacier-blue eyes named Sirajuddin. (Fazlullah appeared briefly, but didn’t stay long; he was observing aitekaaf, a meditation period that lasts 10 days at the end of Ramadan.)
Four Taliban sat in the room with us, watching me with dark, intent eyes. I asked one of them, a 32-year-old named Abdul Ghafoor, what he was fighting for. Islam? Revenge? “This is not personal revenge; this is our religious obligation,” he told me, speaking Pashto through an interpreter. Ghafoor crouched on a low stool, a Kalashnikov resting on his lap. He said he was a recent graduate from the University of Peshawar with a master’s degree in Islamic theology, and that he earned his living as a schoolteacher. Every day after school, and on holidays, he grabbed his gun and joined Fazlullah. He wore a long beard, a black turban, an ammunition vest stuffed with extra banana clips and pistols and Reebok high-tops with a Velcro strap. Messages crackled over the walkie-talkie attached to the collar of his vest. The Taliban were coordinating their movements.
We got into an S.U.V. and rode on a single-lane dirt road, lined with lush fields of cauliflower, apricot orchards and persimmon trees, their ends tipped with the bright orange fruit. We passed through a village made of mud-brick homes, and on one of the walls someone had chalked “Shariat ya Shahadat” (“Shariah or Martyrdom”). “I will never vote for the M.M.A. again,” Ghafoor said, “and we will totally boycott the next election.” Democracy, he added, was un-Islamic.