The Vicious War That Sent Shahzad to Times Square
May 11, 2010 Doomed Missions of Revenge By PATRICK COCKBURN I t has been a hidden war ignored by the outside world. Up to last week nobody paid much attention to the fighting in north-west Pakistan, though more soldiers and civilians have probably been dying there over the last year than in Iraq or Afghanistan. In reality this corner of Pakistan along the Afghan border is the latest in a series of wars originally generated by the US response to 9/11. The first was the war in Afghanistan when the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, the second in Iraq after the invasion of 2003 and the third the renewed war in Afghanistan from about 2006. The fourth conflict is the present one in Pakistan and is as vicious as any of its predecessors, though so far the intensity of the violence has not been appreciated by the outside world. Western governments and media for long looked at the fighting in the tribal areas along Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan as a sideshow to the Afghan war. Wa...