If so, now Pakistani officials are going to look like a bunch of arses in front of the whole world but mostly in front of those that support or condone their atrocities against the tribes. This was/is nothing but a staged drama to appease Washington.
It is a fact that majority of the Al-Qayda heads were arrested in major Pakistani cities and not the Tribal areas.
These generals and the Pakistani establishment are playing and gaining on the usual generalization that majority of the Pakistani people have that these areas are “harboring” worlds most wanted men because of the sensitivities towards the religion of Islam and for fellow Muslims “brothers”.
By BURT HERMAN, Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW - The hunt for terrorists on Pakistan’s frontier appears to be narrowing on an Uzbek terror group that once trained in Afghanistan (news - web sites), but experts said it was unlikely to be sheltering al-Qaida commander Ayman al-Zawahri.
The Pakistani army said Saturday that amid an offensive in South Waziristan, they have intercepted radio conversations mostly in Uzbek and Chechen.
The region is the last believed refuge of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, which seeks to overthrow the secular government of the former Soviet republic.
IMU militants have become a part of the community in South Waziristan and married local women, said Ahmed Rashid, author of “Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia.” They have also used the province as a base for assaults across the border on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he said.
Rashid said Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri don’t use non-Arabs to protect them — making it unlikely that al-Zawahri is in the area, as Pakistani officials had earlier claimed.
Instead, Rashid said it was more likely that the “high-value” target Pakistanis said they are pursuing is Tahir Yuldash, the 30-something political leader of the IMU.
Pakistani Lt. Gen. Safdar Hussain, commander of the operation, said authorities were concentrating on a radio intercept in either Chechen or Uzbek that said a wounded man in a vehicle who tried unsuccessfully to flee the area would need “four men to carry him and 10 or 11 people to protect him.”
The presence of the IMU could also explain the ferocity of the fighting, Rashid said, because the group simply has nowhere else to go: U.S. forces are waiting on the border to scoop up fleeing terrorists, Central Asia is too far away and the IMU’s links to Pakistani fundamentalist groups who might help them are weak.
The IMU has kept a low profile since late 2001, when the U.S.-backed northern alliance routed it from a base in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz. The U.S. military has said the IMU’s military leader, Juma Namangani, was also killed, although Uzbek officials and others have cast doubt on the reports.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the IMU has only been implicated in two bombings in Kyrgyzstan that killed eight people. Last month, three IMU members were sentenced to death in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan for their involvement in the attacks.
The IMU allegedly orchestrated a failed 1999 bombing attack on Uzbek President Islam Karimov that killed at least 16. It was declared a terrorist group by the United States in September 2000 after the kidnapping of four American mountain climbers in Kyrgyzstan.
The group was once believed to have 1,000 to 1,500 members, but experts and diplomats in the region say they now number only a few hundred at most.
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