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North Waziristan's terrorist soup
North Waziristan is a counterterrorism nightmare zone, a place where the dead come back to life and the living come back dead.Pressed against the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan, this mountain wilderness has been the cause of arm-wrestling between Washington and Islamabad for years. At issue is the latter's reluctance to move against the thousands of terrorists and insurgents who hide out locally; and, until recently, the latter's reluctance to allow the former to launch its own attacks against them. Word that the Pakistani-born American citizen charged with an attempt to explode a car bomb in Times Square, New York, last weekend had undergone training in the region has pushed North Waziristan even higher on the Americans' counterterrorism to-do list. Previously the Taliban groups have confined their violent attacks to the region. But knowing who is who in this Waziri terrorist soup and, more importantly, just what they are up to and with whom, is a challenge. In January, US and Pakistani security sources ''confirmed'' the death in a US drone attack of the ruthless Hakimullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. But last week Mehsud popped up, hale and hearty, on a propaganda video. Threatening terrorist strikes on the American homeland, he might well have been alluding to the bungled Times Square attack. Just as confounding was the murder last week of Khalid Khawaja, a former Pakistani intelligence officer who was close to Osama Bin Laden and others in the world of terrorism. Khawaja might have expected a warm welcome to North Waziristan - instead, he was accused of working for the Pakistani government and executed by a group calling itself the Asian Tigers, which is said to have originated in the Punjab region of Pakistan.
The problem is reluctance by Pakistan to attack the fabled
Also, says the Pakistani scholar Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani security forces have done a deal with the militants, under which neither will attack the other in North Waziristan.
They do not have the ability to mount complex attacks. But their crude bombings cause havoc daily in Pakistan and in Afghanistan and they have become magnets for what are known internationally as ''home-grown'' jihadists: Pakistanis who have migrated and their foreign-born offspring, whose passports and familiarity with Western cultures make them valuable as foot soldiers abroad. US and British security experts estimate that as many as 100 Westerners have been trained in the militia camps in the region in recent years. The man accused in the Times Square incident, Faisal Shahzad, 30, reportedly made more than a dozen visits to Pakistan from the US in the past decade. This home-grown element was present in the deadly bombings in London in July 2005 and a foiled plot to use liquid bombs to destroy trans-Atlantic aircraft in 2006. Five young Americans - two of them of Pakistani descent - are facing terrorism charges in Pakistani courts. Pakistani security officers have told reporters there are three concentric circles of militancy in the region. There is a core al-Qaeda leadership of perhaps 100 Arabs, remnants of those who fled Afghanistan with Osama Bin Laden after the US-led invasion in 2001. In a second circle there are hundreds of fighters from other countries, including Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Libya and Uzbekistan. The outer circle consists of maybe 10,000 Pakistani militants who fight for the various Taliban groupings. Islamabad has said repeatedly that its forces are spread too thinly to mount a campaign in North Waziristan. The Times Square attack will probably make it that much harder to continue resisting Washington's pressure. A successful future attack in the US would make it impossible. Posted by: Fred 2010-05-09 |
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