The Pakistani Taliban, which American investigators suspect were behind the attempt to bomb Times Square, have in recent years combined forces with al Qaeda and other groups, threatening to extend their reach and ambitions, Western diplomats, intelligence officials and experts claim.
| What do the good men at the ISI say? Have they yet started to panic, realizing they've reared a fully grown dragon that they're holding only by the tip of the tail? |
Since the group's formation in 2007,
| 2007? Is the journalist quite, quite certain about the timing? |
the main mission of the Pakistani Taliban has been to maintain their hold on territory in Pakistan's tribal areas to train fighters against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan and, increasingly, to strike at the Pakistani state as the military pushes into these havens, the New York Times reported on Friday.
Degraded: Pakistan's military offensives and intensifying US drone strikes have degraded their capabilities. But the Pakistani Taliban have sustained themselves through alliances with any number of other militant groups, splinter cells, foot soldiers and guns-for-hire in the areas under their control.
Those groups have "morphed", a Western diplomat said in a recent interview. Their common agenda, training and resource sharing have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish one from another. The alliances have also added to their skills and tactics and list of shared targets, the newspaper claimed.
| In the business world they call that consolidation. |
"They trade bomb makers and people around," a senior US intelligence official said on Thursday in an interview. "It's becoming this witches' brew."
The senior intelligence official said that in recent years the overall ability and lethality of these groups had dropped, but that the threat to individual countries like the US had increased somewhat because the groups cooperated against a range of targets.
Not least among the groups is al Qaeda, which is exerting growing influence over the others. The Pakistani Taliban increasingly serve as its fig leaf, some experts said.
"The Taliban are the local partner of al Qaeda in Pakistan," said Amir Rana, the director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, who has tracked militant networks for years. "It has no capacity for an international agenda on its own."
Al Qaeda was one of a number of groups, including the Afghan Taliban, that relocated across the border to Pakistan's tribal areas after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
| Interesting. Who else was over there, pray tell? Besides the original Taliban, I mean. |
The Pakistani military has said for months that it has broken the back of the Pakistani Taliban since it began operations in Swat, Bajaur and South Waziristan, among other places. But the top leadership of the militant group remains at large and has sought new refuge largely in North Waziristan.
In a video released on Sunday, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing. But on Thursday a spokesman for the group disavowed responsibility, the New York Times said. "The TTP has had no links with Faisal Shahzad whatsoever," the spokesman, Azam Tariq, said in a phone call to reporters in Peshawar from an undisclosed location. "We never imparted training to him, nor had he ever come to us."
| "Please don't let the American UAVs kill us!" |
But he said the group had placed suicide bombers in the US, who, he said, would carry out their mission at an opportune time.
| Modification: "Please don't kill us for an attack that didn't work. You can kill us later when we're successful." |
The various tribes and clans within the TTP tend to be tied to their local areas and do not have the reach to recruit beyond their territory.
| On the other hand, so long as they're successful, the foreign jihadi wannabes will continue to trickle in. |
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