"It looked like we were in Palestine. It was like two countries fighting,”

INAYAT KILLAY: Troops guarded the remnants of a war zone as a military convoy crunched past shops blown to pieces and an electricity pylon collapsed on rubble near the Afghan border.

“Any human being who sees this destruction will cry. There was bombing, there was shelling, we have never seen such fighting,” Haroon Ahmed told AFP by telephone that evening from the village of Inayat Killay. “It looked like we were in Palestine. It was like two countries fighting,” said Ahmed – still too frightened to give his real name so soon after the army declared victory and expunged the Taliban ‘menace’ from his village. Helicopter gunships, artillery, tanks and ground troops fought to recover the area from hundreds of armed Taliban. There was hand-to-hand combat in the street, said Ahmed.

Safe: Days after the guns fell silent, the army drove the international media into Inayat Killay to prove that one of the most notorious Taliban lairs in the wild, semi-autonomous tribal areas of Bajaur was safe to visit.

The country is under US pressure to eliminate Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens in areas such as those along the Afghan border. Fed up with criticism it is not doing enough, the military now wants to boast about places like Bajaur.

Taliban-free streets – even those reduced to rubble – are the images that Pakistan wants to get on to the world’s television screens.

Amid the destroyed shops, hanging wires, smashed iron shutters and walls shot up, commanders even announced a “symbolic ceremony of surrender”.

Smiling tribal elders – who reportedly were opposed to the Taliban – put garlands of tinsel round the neck of a visiting general and formally agreed not to allow the Taliban back. But what they need now is reconstruction, electricity and running water – all likely to cost millions of rupees.

The civilian chief administrator said he had been asking international donors to provide money he did not expect from a cash-strapped, weakened central government.

But there was no time for details. The military hustled journalists back to waiting helicopters and the neighbouring Mohmand Agency.

There commanders seemed more nervous, suggesting that women may be “more comfortable” sitting in one of glass-tinted vehicles, rather than riding on the back of a truck, worried that headscarfs might come unstuck in the wind.

Racing through a valley, scaling a mountain ridge and down on to a grassy plain, the convoy finally halted outside another heavily-damaged building – a school-turned-Taliban headquarters, according to commanders.

“Three weeks back it was a planning centre used to attack us. There were 40 to 50 militants here before we cleared it,” said Colo Saifullah, pointing to tank tracks in the mud.

Daily Times (Pakistan)