Buner District as on Wikipedia
The fall of the Buner district to the Taliban ought to set alarm bells ringing not just in Islamabad but New Delhi and Washington D.C. as well. With that capture the Taliban is now less than two hours away from Islamabad. Of course, to extrapolate the fall of Buner to mean that the Taliban is now poise to gobble up Islamabad is a bit a stretch. It would be a truly stunning development were the Taliban walk in to the capital unmolested by the country’s army.
The Dawn of Pakistan reported this: “Taliban militants from Swat
took control of Buner on Tuesday and started patrolling bazaars, villages and
towns in the district.
The militants,
who had sneaked into Gokand valley of Buner on April 4, were reported to have
been on a looting spree for the past five days.
They have robbed
government and NGO offices of vehicles, computers, printers, generators, edible
oil containers, and food and nutrition packets.
Sources said that leading political figures, businessmen, NGO officials and Khawaneen, who had played a role in setting up a Lashkar to stop the Taliban from entering Buner, had been forced to move to other areas.
The Taliban have
extended their control to almost all tehsils of the district and
law-enforcement personnel remained confined to police stations and camps.
The Taliban,
equipped with advanced weapons, were reported to be advancing towards border
areas of Swabi, Malakand and Mardan, the hometown of North West Frontier
Province (NWFP) Chief Minister Amir Haider Khan Hoti.”
In Gerald Posner’s telling in the Daily Beast the fall of Buner means the Taliban are on the verge of seizing the country’s nuclear arsenal. While that is certainly not improbable, I think that conclusion disregards the strong self-preservation instinct of Pakistan’s elite, of which the military is a predominant part. Somehow it does not make sense that an army of a million plus very well trained personnel will stand and watch haplessly from the sidelines as the Taliban overrun Islamabad. Unless we argue that the entire Pakistani military is complicit in letting the Taliban take over Islamabad, an absurd proposition even by the standards of the theater of the absurd in the region, there is no way the Taliban can lay their hands on the nuclear arsenal.
If this is indeed the case, then the world is about to be visited by the worst nightmare since the World War II. At the risk of playing down the danger I think the Taliban s unlikely to be anywhere close to seizing the nuclear arsenal unless, of course, they have active help from the Pakistani military. Why would the military conspire to let the Taliban seize something that the generals already control? I am not buying this yet. I hope I am not wrong.