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Pakistanis flee offensive as U.S. sees fresh resolve
Mon May 11, 2009 3:00am EDT
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By Junaid Khan and Paul Eckert
KOTA, Pakistan/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pakistan has been roused to fight the "existential threat" of a growing Islamist insurgency, the top U.S. commander for the Afghan-Pakistan war theater said on Sunday, as Islamabad intensified an offensive against Taliban militants.
Army General David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, said Pakistan's fierce campaign against the Taliban in the Swat valley was a sign its political leaders, people and military were united against the Islamist fighters.
"The actions of the Pakistani Taliban ... seem to have galvanized all of Pakistan," he told the "Fox News Sunday" program.
"Certainly the next few weeks will be very important in this effort to roll back, if you will, this existential threat -- a true threat to Pakistan's very existence that has been posed by the Pakistani Taliban."
Nuclear-armed Pakistan hopes to stop a Taliban insurgency with its offensive in Swat, a former tourist enclave about 130 km (80 miles) from Islamabad, after U.S. criticism that the government was failing to act against the militants.
Pakistan's military ordered people out of parts of the valley on Sunday, temporarily relaxing a curfew to allow civilians to flee fighting.
Up to 200 militants had been killed in Swat and the neighboring Shangla district in the past 24 hours, the military said. The figure could not be independently confirmed.
About 200,000 people have left Swat in recent days and, in all, about 500,000 are expected to flee. They join 555,000 people displaced earlier from Swat and other areas because of fighting since August.
"Everybody wants to get out of this hell," Zubair Khan, a resident of Mingora, the valley's main town, said by telephone. "Some are driving out while many are just on foot. They don't know where they're heading but staying here just means death."
The army went on a full-scale offensive on Thursday after the government ordered troops to flush out militants from the Taliban stronghold.
The offensive was launched while President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was in Washington assuring a nervous United States that his government was committed to fighting militancy.
'A KIND OF CANCER'
Zardari told NBC's "Meet the Press" program Pakistan was fighting a "war of our existence" against an Islamist movement that grew from the 1980s anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan.
He described the Taliban as "a kind of a cancer, created by both of us, Pakistan and America" but disputed assertions his country faced collapse.
"We need to find a strategy where the world gets together against this threat because it's not Pakistan-specific. It's not Afghanistan-specific," said Zardari. Continued...
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