Frontline kicked off its new season with a bang

More than 100 tribal leaders assassinated. An original agreement between the Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf and the al Qaeda-connected Northwest Frontier Taliban leader Nek Mohammed to have a cease-fire, with surrender of al Qaeda leaders, negotiated in 2004, later being broken. Haji Omar, head of the Taliban in South Waziristan, pledging to continue to import fighters into Afghanistan. And, as Frontline pointed out, a similar agreement negotiated just a month ago has already been broken.

No Pakistani arrests of any Pashtun Taliban leaders. Little more than that, at times, on al Qaeda leaders, and that only under American pressure. A Pakistan that either cannot or will not intensely patrol the Northwest Frontier. A Pakistan that is arguably not a whole lot less of a failed state than post-invasion Iraq or Afghanistan.

That’s the Pakistani border area profiled in detail in the “Return of the Taliban” episode.

A Pakistani journalist, Hayat Ullah Khan, who becomes a freelancer for PBS’s “Frontline” in areas restricted to Westerners kidnapped six days after his photographs showed a U.S. missile killed al-Qaeda connected leader Abu Hamsha in Pakistan. Musharraf first claimed to not even know who he was, then to say he was not in Pakistani custody.

Six days after the interview, he was found dead in a ditch, bound with government-issue handcuffs and with nine bullets in his head. So, you have a Pakistan that will clamp down when it can, and brutally, to maintain control. The dichotomy should underline just how much out of control, at least control from Islamabad, the Northwest Frontier is.

At the same time, you have an America refusing to recognize the fragile tightrope of a Pakistani leader who has survived multiple assassination attempts, who has little control over his own intelligence services, and not necessarily total control over all units in his own army.

And, in the combination of a power vacuum and a cash infusion in neighboring Afghanistan to roll back the Soviets, mullahs gained new authority, despite “Pashtuns derisively refer(ring) to the mullah as ‘the dog that lives off of table scraps.’”

Can we win the war with the Taliban? Is Musharraf right ― from his own point of view, setting aside that of the U.S. ― to try to negotiate? Read all this and more discussed online.
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Go see the even more in-depth online coverage. This map will show you the Northwest Frontier in some detail, as well as a larger overview of both Pakistan and Afghanistan.