Half a Million Flee Northwest Provinces for Refugee Camp

May 9, 2009, SWABI, Pakistan — -- Jamshed grabs his shirt, the only piece of clothing he brought as he fled the fighting. He points to a blanket, the only item he managed to carry with him from his home. He describes how he left his oldest son to guard his house in his village in Buner, where the Pakistani military is fighting the Taliban.

Does he worry about his son and the rest of the family trapped in his hometown?

"It is my biggest wish that my family comes back to me," he says. And then he starts crying. Sobbing. The emotional weight of the last few days -- the 20-mile walk, the fear of Taliban-laid mines and wayward army shells, the living in a tent camp under 95 degree heat -- he finally allows it to overwhelm him.

As a group of visitors leaves, Jamshed manages little response, surrounded by three of his six children in a small, United Nations-stamped tent in the Swabi refugee camp, 20 miles away from the fighting currently raging in the Northwest Frontier Province.

On the second full day after declaring the state was at war, Pakistan's prime minster said today that Pakistan was "fighting for its survival" in its attempts to "eliminate" the Taliban from the Swat Valley, from where they have distributed brutal forms of justice and extended their reach to an area just a few mountain tops away from the capital, Islamabad.

Both Pakistan and the United States say the fight is an essential one, and increasingly, residents of the area publicly oppose the Taliban and ask for the military to crush them. Whether the army can push the Taliban back from the area -- and the government can then step in and help rebuild the area -- will help determine how capable Pakistan is to defeat a militancy it has battled on and off for seven years.

But the Pakistani army has resisted the type of counterinsurgency training it needs to fight an embedded insurgency, and its reputation for causing civilian casualties has created the largest exodus in South Asia since Pakistani violently split with India in 1947.

In the Swabi tent camp, about an hour north of Islamabad, 3,500 people are spread across a few acres of tents. But the camp's directors say they expect 10 times the number of people to arrive in just the coming days. The U.N. is building two silos and expects to take over the camp in the coming days.