WASHINGTON, April 22: The Pakistan Army lost 700 soldiers in its effort to push Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters from out of their tribal sanctuaries in Pakistan, says a report in an American magazine, The Nation.

Graham Usher in the April issue of The Nation writes that in Waziristan “the Taliban defended villages, ambushed army patrols, killed pro-government elders and imposed their own brand of ‘Islamic’ law and order.”

He argues that the fear of a “political defeat” forced Islamabad to sign peace treaties with tribal elders in South and North Waziristan in 2005 and 2006.

He notes that in 56 years of independence, Pakistani soldiers had never set foot in Waziristan, “part of the trade-off for keeping the tribes loyal,” and when they did, the numbers of civilians killed and displaced were in the thousands.

He quotes Malik Qadir Khan, a tribal leader in North Waziristan, as saying: “Everyone supported the Taliban when the army came in. It was a people’s revolt. Pakistan had broken its promise, and that’s a big thing in the tribal areas. You don’t break your promise.”

Commenting on US Vice-President Dick Cheney’s advice to President Gen Pervez Musharraf to “go after them”, the magazine quotes a local journalist as saying: “Every use of force is a victory for the militants.”

The answer, according to the journalist, “must involve a strategy that provides education and jobs for thousands of impoverished and unemployed youth, who are ready recruits for the Taliban”.

The Nation quotes another Pakistani writer as telling its reporter that tensions in the tribal regions will not lessen until Pakistan has a civilian government. “Only a civilian government can bring reform. You cannot have free elections in the tribal areas when there are no free elections in Pakistan,” he says.

The report claims that currently, the Pakistan Taliban are the de facto rulers of the areas vacated by the Pakistan Army. In Miramshah, capital of North Waziristan, it is not the elders or police who govern, “it is the (militants) and young men with black shaggy hair and rifles slung over their shoulders”.

Commenting on Islamabad’s dilemma in dealing with militants in the Waziristan region, Mr Usher writes the US “will not tolerate” the standoff and the public response to the retaliatory Pakistani bombings in the Bajaur tribal area and South Waziristan has been “ferocious”. Locals claimed that the attacks, which killed seminary students and woodcutters, were not executed by Pakistani army helicopters but by US Predator drones flown in from Afghanistan.

Suicide bomber responses to the aerial attacks since then mean the Taliban are saying, according to retired army general Talat Masood, “if you come after us in the name of America’s war in the tribal areas, we will come after you all over Pakistan”.

The author claims that during his recent visit to Islamabad, US Vice- President Cheney delivered a “tough message”, namely he was upset by peace agreements Islamabad had signed with pro-Taliban tribesmen along Pakistan’s border areas with Afghanistan.

Since 9/11, Pakistan has received $10 billion in direct US aid and as much again in covert aid, “most of it military”, The Nation article says. The “crisis” President Musharraf faces today, the author says, is the worst since he took power in October 1999.