What do the Taliban do for entertainment on a Thursday night? What they do best, of course- killing people. And for the greater enjoyment of others, they do it in a public venue so others can get their jollies, as well.
At least that’s what happened to two alleged U.S. spies in North Waziristan (NW Pakistan) this past Thursday night. They didn’t just shoot them, or hang them, no, they wanted to go all out, so to rival any “Friday The Thirteenth” movie in gore, they strapped bombs on to the men’s bodies and blew them to pieces.
Five masked militants paraded the handcuffed men before dozens of people in the Datta Kheil area and accused them of passing information to the United States on targets for its CIA-operated pilotless drone aircraft.
“They strapped explosives around their bodies and then blew them up,” a Pakistani intelligence official in the region told Reuters by telephone.
Of course, parading them around is probably more a means of intimidation and a warning to others to back off helping the infidel enemy. The problem is, I’m not sure they even had proof that the tow men were actually spies, but that kind of small detail means absolutely nothing to people like the Taliban. And these two men aren’t the first to have been executed as suspected spies. There have apparently been hundreds of accused Pakistani and U.S. spies that have been killed, and there probably was little proof of their guilt, either.
The preferred method of killing an alleged suspect is by gunfire or decapitation, but locals claimed this was the first time anyone had been blown up. Of course, decapitation is equally as barbaric as blowing someone up, but again, one has to consider the source.
Northwest Pakistan has always been pretty much a lawless region and the nerve center of Islamist militants. That whole area, considered a Pashtun tribal belt, was where the U.S./Pakistani forces helped the Taliban wage their jihad against the Soviet troops in occupied Afghanistan during the 1980s. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but had we known what we would unleash by helping the Taliban take control over Afghanistan, I’m sure we would have left the far more civilized Soviets in power.
Now the world is stuck with Pakistani Taliban that the Pakistani government seems hesitant to root out.
The United States wants Pakistan to extend its offensive to North
Waziristan and go after militants there, particularly Afghan Taliban, who launch cross-border attacks on Western forces in Afghanistan.The Pakistani military, which has long seen the Afghan Taliban as tools for limiting the influence of old rival India in Afghanistan, says it will deal with North Waziristan but in its own time.
Pakistan is foolish to view India as more of an enemy than the Taliban. And if it continues to waste time by waiting to deal with North Waziristan in its own time, it might be too late.
