South Asia Center Director Shuja Nawaz writes for Foreign Policy‘s South Asia Channel on the Pakistani military offensive on Taliban and allied Islamist forces in North Waziristan:
istan’s military is in the midst of an assault on Taliban and allied Islamist fighters in the rugged mountains of North Waziristan — an offensive that the U.S. government has been urging it to undertake for at least a decade. The conventional wisdom in Washington has been that a North Waziristan sweep would clean out the last and strongest bastion of armed Islamic militancy in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre — most critically, the so-called Haqqani network of guerrillas fighting the U.S.-led forces in neighboring Afghanistan.
But even though this offensive seems likely to be the most ambitious Pakistani attempt in the past decade to control North Waziristan, it will, at best, fall far short of what Washington and Islamabad hope for.