The Sultan of Swat
Posted on 02/03/2008 8:57:15 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
More than two months after the Pakistani military launched an operation to clear the district of Swat in the Northwest Frontier Province, pockets of Taliban forces and safe havens remain. The Pakistani military and police have taken casualties far greater the combined US and Iraqi forces have fighting the insurgency in Iraq, according to an Interior Ministry report obtained by the Daily Times.
Military and police casualties in Swat outpace Iraq in January 2008
The most telling information from the Interior Ministry's status report on Swat is the casualty data. The Pakistani security forces operating in the small district lost 195 soldiers, policemen, and Frontier Constabulary paramilitaries during the month of January alone. Data on December 2007 is not available.
The Pakistani military has been keen to report the killing or capturing of Taliban forces in Swat, but has withheld data on military and police casualties. While hundreds of Taliban were reported killed or captured in January, only a small fraction of the security forces casualties were reported.
The Taliban insurgency in Swat is clearly far more dangerous than the Iraqi insurgency at this point in time. The Iraqi security forces and the US military lost 108 soldiers and police during January 2008, compared to Pakistan's 195 in Swat. These numbers do not include data from the South Waziristan and Orakzai tribal agencies, where Pakistani troops are actively fighting the Taliban.
Taking into account Swat's size and population compared with Iraq - 684 square miles and a population of 1.5 million compared to Iraq's 169,234 square miles and nearly 27 million - the insurgency in Swat extremely dangerous. Factoring the South Waziristan and Orakzai numbers, as well as the attacks against police, paramilitaries, and soldiers throughout Pakistan,
(Excerpt) Read more at longwarjournal.org ...
fyi
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Roggio is missing the boat again.
Pak troops are going into combat without personal body armor, and without armored support.
Pak troops don’t have good air cover and don’t have much in the way of air support save for a few helicopters.
Pak troops don’t have U.S. training, experience, communications, sat intel, and combined arms abilities.
Nor do Pak troops have U.S. medical capabilities on the battlefield.
So it’s expected that Pak forces will compensate for all of the above with large amounts of their own spilt blood.
You can’t just say that the insurgency is hotter in Pak than in Iraq simply because Pak troops have a higher casualty rate (for the above reasons).
That being said, the insurgency in Pak *might* be hotter than in Iraq, if for nothing else that Al Qaeda has been so utterly beaten in Iraq at this point in time.
Good analysis.
Thank you!!
I posted similarly elsewhere and was unhappy to find that it seemed all in the blogosphere accepted this as fact.
Our military is afforded the best available training, protection, medical evacuation, and treatment on earth...We enjoy the advantages of 24/7 aerial recon and air/fire support. Wounded soldiers have >90% survival rate and get to a hospital in 30-60 minutes.
KIA rates don’t prove anything - more people will die in motorcycle crashes if they don’t wear a good helmet...it doesn’t make their highway more dangerous!
See below for more about this inaccurate article...
The facts in the article are simply untrue. The original article (http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008story_3-2-2008_pg1_2) states the these casualties were from JAN 07-08. 13 months, not one.
The US Military suffered 941 KIA and 6100 WIA in the same time frame.
Iraqi Army and Security forces - over 1500 KIA.
(globalsecurity and icasualties.org)
The statement, “The Pakistani military and police have taken casualties far greater the combined US and Iraqi forces have fighting the insurgency in Iraq” is false by a vast margin. The headline - while I’m sure unintented as such - is misleading.
A much more appropriate comparison would be the Swat and the Diyala Province (6800 sq mi / Pop of 1.27 million), home to 128 US (not including Iraqi ISF) casualties in the same time frame.
Although I agree the region IS important and dangerous, I thought it was necessary to offer some persepctive - The stats don’t simply back up the claim!
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