EPA / Keystone Press
Commentators in Pakistan are also questioning their own security services’ ability to monitor the militant groups in the country. “If a connection to the Pakistani Taliban is established, it would constitute a major security breach for Pakistan’s intelligence services,” says Iqbal Khattak, Peshawar bureau chief for Pakistan’s Daily Times newspaper. “How could they not know the TTP was expanding its operations overseas?”
Indeed, Pakistani authorities appear to have turned a blind eye to the global consequences of jihadi beliefs gaining a foothold in Pakistan, focusing their attention instead on the threat militant groups pose to the country itself. Military operations along the northwestern border with Afghanistan have targeted only those groups that have attacked targets inside Pakistan itself. Others, like the LeT and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), both with proven global ambitions, have been left largely untouched.
According to U.S. officials and media reports, a suspected activist for the JeM allegedly helped Shahzad travel from Karachi to Peshawar and then on to North Waziristan, where investigators claim he met with the Pakistani Taliban to receive bomb-making training. Immediately after the Times Square incident, the TTP’s Mehsud warned in a video, apparently recorded in April, that the group was preparing attacks on U.S. soil. Shortly after the Manhattan plot was foiled, one TTP spokesman took credit for the attack but another spokesman later denied the group’s involvement.
Last Sunday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder disputed the Taliban denial, saying, “The evidence that we’ve now developed shows that the Pakistani Taliban has directed this plot.” Nonetheless, questions remain whether an outfit like the TTP could muster the resources to carry out an overseas operation. According to some analysts, the issue goes far deeper than any one group broadening its jihadist agenda. Local elders in North Waziristan, speaking to Maclean’s by telephone, said North Waziristan has become such a broad amalgamation of jihadi groups that it’s impossible to tell who is who. “There are so many different groups here,” says one elder who has fled the region and taken shelter in a bordering town. “No one knows who is Taliban or al-Qaeda or Jaish or Lashkar or just a simple criminal. They all work together now.”
For a budding global jihadist searching for a home, North Waziristan would be the place to go. And most observers agree that with proximity has come ideological integration. “There’s a bit of a false distinction being made between these groups,” one senior U.S. official told the New York Times last week. “The Pakistani Taliban is connected to al-Qaeda, which is connected to the Haqqani network . . . I don’t think you can put team jerseys on them.”
Increasingly, it appears these groups are now adhering to the al-Qaeda playbook: global jihad is part of the agenda.
What’s worrying for both U.S. and Pakistani authorities is the initiation of the Pakistani Taliban into global operations, adding another element to the growing web of groups looking to strike targets in the West.
For Shahzad, Pakistan was the ideal place to find the right extremist fit for his ambitions. Despite the LeT’s claim that it did nothing to help Shahzad’s attempt to attack the U.S., their involvement in grooming him for a mission ultimately makes them culpable as well. Connecting the dots from 2006 to the attempted attack in New York last week confirms what many analysts have feared: Pakistan has become the mega-mart for global jihad.
Pages: 1 2
