Greetings and will attempt to offer one old trooper's views to answer some of your open ended question(s):

1. Recent successful drone attacks in other Northern Pakistan provinces and areas have been working and the Taliban wanted a safe have that does not have a common border with Afghanistan. SWAT meets their needs now and they have just managed to combine murder, threat of murder, suicide bombings, and having too many friends in high places in the Pakistani ISI (read that as Intelligence Service) and the upper ranks of the Pakistan Army..who have long been pro-Taliban and pro-al Qaida.

2. Your fears are well founded as this largely pits the Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Army against both the new President and new Prime Minister of Pakistan.

3. Now both the Taliban and al Qaida, for the moment at least, feel they are in a safer site, area is about the size of the US State of Delaware, have driven killed and/or driven out about 1/3 of the native Pukhtuns...the invading Taliban are of other subtribes and not native to Swat, and are deeply feared and resented by the differing Pukhtun subtrives inside and native to SWAT.

4. This in league with the terrorists action by the Pak government and Army, largely the Army is pulling these strings of surrender, invites more such capitulations and surrenders to the core of all this religious terrorism, Sharia Law, in other Northern parts of Pakistan.

5. Especially upsetting to me, since I served in the Peshawar and Karachi areas many years ago in our military, is that the capital of all of Pakistan, Islamabad, is not that many miles S-SW of SWAT and is full of radical madrassas itself, in fact, the Red Madrassah had a week long fire fight between the Pak Army and the Taliban teachers and students there in Islamabad about a year ago...which then President Musharraf put his career as President on the line to try to root them out...via the weeklong gunfight.

Your fears are well founded.

ASIDE: My wife and I met some very fine Dutch Special Forces while everyone was touring the Amiercan Cemetery at Normandy, France, summer, 2006. These Dutch were your special forces headed from that military leave weekend straight into Afghanistan. I and we over here appreciate our alliance and long term friendship with the government and all the people of Holland. Thank you to you and to all your countrymen. Colonel George L. Singleton, USAF, Ret.