At the onset of the Pakistani SWAT campaign, sources from Pakistan told Frontier India Strategic and Defence that the Pakistani game Plan is to bomb SWAT for 15 days and then withdraw. They said that Pakistan is going to claim high number causalities among Taliban. The second part came true when Pakistan yesterday claimed that 700 Taliban were killed. Today they came out with a claim that they captured a hideout in Gatt Puchar (a Taliban rear-base), which is a center for 4,000 fighters!

I wrote following Why Pakistani Army hesitates taking on Taliban?, Pakistani Army should do more than just shelling Taliban and Kill Taliban by all means, but verify for hinting what is going to unfold.

This must be the most efficient army in the world, 15,000 Pakistani troops are engaged against an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 Taliban fighters in Swat. 56,103 square kilometers of Pakistan under Taliban control.

Let us take a corresponding figure, Indian Army fights estimated 2500 to 3000 militants in Jammu and Kashmir with approximate (open source) 500000 soldiers. It has been engaged there more than 2 decades. We are talking about a counter insurgency force along which the free world soldiers wants to train in counter insurgency. The area of operation is approximately 8000 square kilometers.

ISAF puts total troop Strength in Afghanistan as approx 58390. 17000 more are coming. For the first half of 2008, US aircraft dropped 1,853 bombs. Approximately about 160,000 US troops were in Iraq at peak times.

The numbers like 700 and 4000 are pure psychological in nature which gives us an impression of nearly 5000 Taliban fighters have been effected.

There are also concrete reports that Pakistan is shelling towns and villages indiscriminately. The catch is, how can you verify that the man dead is a Taliban or not.

To quote the article “Cynicism among Pakistani refugees”, By Abdul Hai Kakar, BBC Urdu service, Peshawar, Friday, 8 May 2009:

I interviewed a large number of refugees in Swabi, but I did not meet a single person who actually saw the army and the Taleban as members of opposing camps.
Instead, I heard, they were “two sides of the same coin”.
“The Pakistani army has hurt us badly – but while they have killed civilians, I swear I haven’t seen a single shell directed at the Taleban,” says Shahdad Khan, a refugee sheltering at a camp in Swabi’s Shave Ada area.
Others question the Pakistani military’s stated commitment to “eliminating” the Taleban.
“No way,” Siraj tells me.
“The army brought the Taleban to our area! It’s politics. The Taleban and the army are brothers.”

To quote the source, “everything will be back to normal after 15 days. Nothing will change. They just want to take the US money.”