What Is Waziristan?

The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid reports that in June 2002, U.S. military officers in Bagram, Afghanistan, told him that up to 3,500 foreign militants had taken refuge in South Waziristan, where Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence, or ISI, was turning a blind eye to them. The United States was pressing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to send troops against the militants. Musharraf was resisting, preferring to save his military for Pakistan's perennial stand-off with India.

Al Qaeda regrouped in Angur Adda in South Waziristan (where US Special Operations forces landed for a fruitless operation earlier this month), sending fighters on missions against American forces across the border in Afghanistan just as they had against Soviet forces in the 1980s. Tribal elders who opposed al-Qaeda or Taliban operations in the region were executed. That created severe rifts between Wazir tribes and al-Qaeda and the Taliban, who were perceived as outsiders. But the Pakistani government never took advantage of the rifts. It either attempted, through the ISI, to play the Taliban presence in the area to its advantage. Or it staged heavy-handed, showy, fruitless attacks designed to give the United States the impression that Pakistan was trying to control the region. It never has.

Last Friday McCain repeated an assertion he's been dropping at various points on the campaign trail, wherever he's sought to buff up his foreign policy experience--that he's "been to Waziristan." Yesterday I raised questions about the assertion, both for its accuracy and implications. Today it's time to simply ask (and answer) the question that should be on a few lips after Friday's debate: What is Waziristan?