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Pakistan to invite Taliban's victims to fight back

AP, Peshawar
Civilians who lived under the Taliban's harsh rule in Pakistan's Swat Valley may soon be recruited to police the region with preference going to those hit hardest during the militants' two-year campaign of terror, a top official says.
Rebuilding the valley's decimated police force is considered crucial to bringing home more than 2 million people displaced by an army offensive and to keeping the Taliban from coming back. It's a process of great interest to the US, which wants Pakistan to eliminate safe havens for militants fighting in neighbouring Afghanistan.
To fight an insurgency, "the people have to be actively with you," Malik Naveed Khan, inspector general of police for the North West Frontier Province, told The Associated Press in an interview Monday.
He said some 6,000 civilians would be recruited, along with a force of 2,500 exmilitary personnel that lend further backing to the police. Authorities plan to open recruiting centres in camps where some 200,000 displaced Swatis and other refugees from surrounding districts are staying.
Khan said the plan needs formal approval from the provincial government, but that "everyone is on board." The goal is to have a full force ready by mid-August.
Bashir Bilour, the province's senior minister, said authorities support the idea because of the citizens' ' knowledge of the area, people and local customs and traditions. They will also have a feeling of ownership and participation in the process."
Before the violent Taliban campaign took off in earnest in the valley in 2007, Swat was considered a "soft district," with low crime rates and around 2,000 lightly armed police for a population of 1.75 million. Khan said.
I he better-equipped militants quickly targeted police, beheading them, shooting thorn, attacking their checkpoints and
even forcing some officers' parents to swear on the Quran that their sons would stop patrolling. At least 120 police were killed and around 700 officers fled the force, Khan said.
Candidates for the new policing jobs need to be "able-bodied, tough people with a clear background, giving some preference to those whose houses have been burned and who have been targeted," Khan said in his office in Peshawar.
He didn't respond when asked whether the program was deliberately ^PPlng into a desire for vengeance, but said he expected recruits to be attracted by the salaries $125 a month, about the same as a police constable earns.
The government has already had some success in raising militias, known as lashkars, to fend off militants elsewhere in the northwest. Troops backed up a militia that arose in the Dir region this month and fought the Taliban, whom they blamed for a mosque bombing.