Insurgency takes heavy toll on Pakistani police: Tampa Bay

By Vanessa Gezari, Times Correspondent

Most days, the police chief of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province feels more like the commander of an unwieldy counterinsurgency than a cop. In the last year, Taliban militants have overrun the territory his men patrol, a province of 23 million that skirts Pakistan's lawless tribal belt along the Afghan border. Kidnappings, beheadings and suicide attacks have grown common. • One morning last month, Inspector General Malik Naveed Khan leaned back in a leather armchair in his office and lit a Dunhill. As a boy he'd been drawn to the glamor of the gun and the badge; 36 years he'd been doing this, he said with amazement, exhaling smoke. Then a yellow telephone near his right hand rang. • "Hello," he said. "Oh God. Oh God. Okay." • A police sub-inspector had picked up an oilcan full of explosives, but it had slipped from his hands and detonated, killing him. In 2007, Khan's force lost 72 police. In 2008, the number more than doubled, with more than 500 injured, often seriously, losing legs and eyes. In the first few weeks of 2009, more than a dozen police have been killed and wounded in bomb blasts or kidnapped by insurgents. Several nights a week, Khan is awakened by one of his aides and told of another attack, another dead officer. "It's like losing a part of your body," he said. • The insurgency's toll on the police is a sign of its evolution from a border uprising — confined to Pakistan's lawless tribal areas and targeting U.S. and international troops fighting in Afghanistan — to one that preys on the country's urbane middle class.

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