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   Blankets, bullets, a pneumatic drill — a Taliban HQ

 BINAI BABA ZIARAT, Pakistan: From the dizzying heights of a Taliban militant command centre, Pakistani generals sense victory in Swat as they tour an elaborate warren of tunnels and caves built into a mountain ridge.

‘Hardcore’ militants occupied the Binai Baba Ziarat heights for years, they say, operating a communications hub for the entire valley and training fighters until soldiers recently captured the mountain in Pakistan's northwest.

‘Snipers were firing from all over these places. The valley was a killing ground. My soldiers were fighting uphill. It took around 14 days to capture, there were two martyrs and 21 injured,’ said Lieutenant Colonel Riaz Tahir.

Ventilation shafts stick out like snorkels. One hideout was a kitchen.Blankets have been left in bedrooms. A pneumatic drill was apparently used to drill tunnels to store rations and weapons.The militants even had electricity, lugging a generator 7,500 feet up the narrow slippery tracks that climb the craggy rock face.

Officers say the men who lived here were Afghans, Tajiks, Uzbeks but mostly Pakistanis from the surrounding valley and Waziristan.A telephone book scrawled with Pakistani mobile numbers and exercise books were laid out for visiting journalists to examine, the inside pages filled with notes dated May 2 on the ‘principles of guerrilla warfare.’A bullet has torn through the centre of the book.

Gazing across the ridge of Binai Baba Ziarat, where the Pakistan flag snaps triumphantly in the wind, Major General Sajjad Ghani points out landmarks of the military's third offensive in two years against the Taliban in Swat valley.To the south lies Mingora, where the military now says it is fighting to wrest back control of what is the district's main town.To the west is the town of Matta — secured and apparently fit for refugees to return within two weeks after living for ‘years’ under Taliban control.

Beyond lies Peochar, which the army hopes to secure ‘within a week’, then there is the town of Khawazakhela, which the military says is secure — although journalists were not invited on patrol to find out.‘I see the upper Swat area returning to normalcy pretty soon,’ Ghani told reporters back at base in Khawazakhela, estimating it would take ‘two to three months’ to clear the area and welcome back civilians who fled their homes.

He added it was ‘just a question of time’ before the core militant leadership are eliminated, though Swat Taliban commander Mullah Fazlullah has already slipped through the net at least once.As the generals were eager to point out, there are no discernible signs of urban destruction but Human Rights Watch has accused military strikes of causing heavy civilian casualties.

From the air, Khawazakhela and Matta look like ghost towns.But for all their bluster about securing this town and taking that ridge, there is also a strong sense that the militants will be no pushover.

One brigadier said militants were bringing in reinforcements to replace the fallen, while the enemy never seemed to run out of ammunition.‘There are no quick fixes,’ he said. ‘How long were the British in Northern Ireland... the Americans in Vietnam?’

The rugged terrain makes it easy to hide, Swat is also densely populated — estimated at 1.7 million — making it easy to melt into the crowd. Officers talk about a ‘faceless’ enemy — a man who picks up a gun becomes a ‘miscreant’ but reverts to being a civilian the moment he puts it down.

Many see the Taliban as a social uprising, similar in some sense to class warfare between the haves and the have-nots — requiring a ‘civilian surge’ and development well beyond the scope of military victory.‘Their end-game is obvious — create a state of their own,’ said Ghani.

Asked whether they would ever come to Islamabad, he gives an adamant ‘no.’

DAWN:Sunday, 24 May, 2009