By IANS
Washington : The Pakistan Army is for the first time suffering “significant numbers of defections”, with soldiers reluctant to fight in tribal areas, says the International Herald Tribune.
In a report from Peshawar, the daily said that the standing of the Pakistani military was being harmed by the soldiers’ refusal to take on the Taliban and pro-Taliban Islamic hardliners in areas close to Afghanistan.
“The defections gain only scant attention in the press, but people talk about them,” said the report.
“There are rumours of court-martials, although the information is tightly held by the army, former officers said,” the Tribune reported.
“Morale among the police in Peshawar has plummeted amid a series of police killings, making the city far from the glamorous posting it once was, when they were fighting smugglers and other outlaws.”
The defections in the army follow growing incidents of suicide bombings and other attacks targeted at the military and other security forces unleashed by the militants.
“Pakistani soldiers never used to be targets,” the daily quoted Muhammad Sulaman Khan, chief of operations for the Peshawar Police, as saying.
“Now we have the radicals antagonized by (President Pervez) Musharraf and his politics of cozying up to the US.”
Indo-Asian News Service