Not long ago, a bomb attack on New York City’s Times Square would have had intelligence officials and terrorism experts checking off the usual suspects among the sources of terrorist plots against the U.S. — Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq. But these days, says a top counterterrorism official, “when I hear of a terrorist plot, I can count back from 10, and before I get to zero, someone will bring up the P word.”
That’s P for Pakistan.
Over the past couple of years, more plots against U.S. targets have emanated from or had a strong connection to Pakistan than any other country. Says the counterterrorism official: “It was totally predictable that the smoking Pathfinder would lead to someone with Pakistan in his past.”
Nor would it come as a surprise if it were revealed that Faisal Shahzad, who has claimed to investigators that he was working alone, was in fact linked to an ever lengthening list of extremist groups operating in Pakistan’s northern wilds. These groups, whose attacks had long been confined to the Indian subcontinent, are now emerging as a deadly threat to the U.S. and its allies.
As the core of al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, wilts under the constant pounding from the CIA’s Predator drone campaign, Pakistani groups are mounting operations deep into the West.
Such groups as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) have not yet notched major successes against U.S. targets to match Hizballah’s bombings in 1980s Lebanon or al-Qaeda’s destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. But they have lately mounted operations of great audacity and sophistication. LeT has been operating in Europe for at least a decade, initially raising funds from the large Pakistani diaspora in countries like Britain and France and later recruiting volunteers for the jihad against Western forces. At least one of the plotters of the 2005 London subway bombings was an LeT trainee, and British investigators believe the group has been connected to other plots in the U.K.
The TTP, which claimed credit for Shahzad’s failed bombing, was behind the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan late 2009. And in 2008, in the most spectacular attack by a Pakistani-based group on Western targets, LeT bombed and shot up a railway station, a hospital, two five-star hotels and a Jewish center in Mumbai, killing more than 160 people, including six Americans. Afterward, Indian authorities scanning a computer belonging to one of the Mumbai plotters found a list of 320 targets worldwide; only 20 were Indian.
Now, security officials fear, Pakistani jihadis are spreading their operations across the Atlantic, recruiting U.S. citizens to their cause just as Britons were recruited a decade ago. If that assessment proves accurate, the Times Square bomb plot could be the first of more to come.
An Evolving Threat What are the wellsprings of Pakistani radicalism? In the 1980s, many fervently Islamic groups were set up in Pakistan to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, however, these groups and their spin-offs did not lay down their arms but instead turned their attention to Pakistan’s old enemy, India. Encouraged by Pakistani civilian, military and intelligence authorities, LeT, Jaish-e-Mohammed and others refashioned themselves as freedom fighters in the cause of Kashmir, the Himalayan territory claimed by both India and Pakistan. Pakistani officials regarded the jihadis as a proxy in their conflict with India, and Islamabad provided groups like LeT with land, funding and even military training, though it was understood that they could not attack targets in Pakistan or get involved in any operations against the U.S., Pakistan’s ally. Though there was some low-key cooperation between the Pakistani groups and al-Qaeda, it didn’t merit much attention from Washington.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, however, the Bush Administration began to look more closely into bin Laden’s alliances. Washington pressured the Pakistani government of General Musharraf to crack down on LeT, Jaish and others, which by then were on the State Department’s list of proscribed terrorist organizations. But the government in Islamabad allowed the groups to continue operations — in December 2001, LeT attacked the Indian Parliament in an audacious move that nearly brought the two countries to war — with only cosmetic changes to their names. LeT, for instance, merged with its charitable foundation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawah.
Gradually, the Pakistani groups began to broaden their targets beyond the Indian enemy. LeT propaganda, for instance, began to focus on links, real and imagined, between India, Israel and the U.S. By the mid-2000s, the group’s leader, a former Islamic-studies professor named Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, began to call for a jihad against the West using language similar to those of the fatwas issued by bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. LeT fighters began to venture out of their comfort zone, joining the fighting in Iraq.
At the same time, a new group of radicals, the TTP, had begun to emerge along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. While LeT, Jaish and other older groups were dominated by Pakistan’s majority Punjabi ethnic group, the TTP was overwhelmingly Pashtun, the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan. And the TTP never had any qualms about challenging the Pakistani state as well as NATO troops in Afghanistan. In 2007 its leader, Baitullah Mehsud, ordered the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and attacks on military targets; he also unleashed a wave of suicide bombings in Pakistani cities. While Pakistani authorities have continued to take a somewhat tolerant view of the Punjabi groups, their attitude toward the TTP is another matter. The army began to crack down on the group in 2008, and in the summer of 2009, a CIA drone took out Baitullah Mehsud. His successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, was thought to have been killed in another drone strike in January 2010, but he re-emerged last week to claim responsibility for the Times Square attack.
Militants in Our Midst How plausible is that? U.S. officials were initially dismissive of the TTP’s claims but began to reconsider once it emerged that Shahzad had been trained in bombmaking at a camp in Waziristan, which is Mehsud’s stronghold. There is no doubt that the TTP and other Pakistani groups are now recruiting among Americans.
In October 2009, the FBI arrested a Pakistani American, David Coleman Headley, and a Pakistani Canadian associate, for plotting to attack the Copenhagen offices of a Danish newspaper that had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. More shockingly, the FBI said that Headley had been involved in the Mumbai attacks too (he had scoped out the hotels and the Jewish center for LeT) and was planning to bomb the U.S., British and Indian embassies in Dhaka, before local authorities discovered the plot. In March, Headley pleaded guilty to all charges; he is now waiting to be sentenced.
The Headley revelations alarmed the Obama Administration’s security team. In January, Daniel Benjamin, the State Department’s top counterterrorism official, said in a speech to the Cato Institute in Washington that “very few things worry me as much as the strength and ambition of LeT.” The next month, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that LeT was “becoming more of a direct threat … placing Western targets in Europe in its sights.”
The TTP is certainly doing so. In 2008, it plotted to bomb the public-transport network in Barcelona, though the operation was busted before it got much beyond the planning phase. If Shahzad was indeed acting on Mehsud’s instructions, then the TTP has come closer to successfully executing a large-scale operation on American soil than any group has since Sept. 11, 2001.
Exporting Jihad It’s fair to say that many analysts remain skeptical of the ability of a group like the TTP to operate outside Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mehsud lacks the kinds of networks cultivated by the Punjabi groups among Pakistanis living in the West.
The TTP’s fighters also tend to be poor, unsophisticated peasants from the mountains, ill equipped for foreign assignments. Besides, Mehsud and his fighters now find themselves under attack from the air (the CIA drones) as well as on the ground (the Pakistani military) and may not have the freedom to think big. They’re much more likely to seek U.S. targets close at hand: in April, the TTP attacked the U.S. consulate in the Pakistani city of Peshawar.
But the TTP is working on ways to export terrorism. The group’s training camps in Waziristan are a magnet for Western jihadis, including U.S. citizens. Once trained, some return home and become executors of the TTP’s global ambitions. It’s likely that the camps attended by both Najibullah Zazi, who confessed to planning attacks on the New York subway system in 2009, and Shahzad, the alleged Times Square bomber, were run by the TTP. Others will no doubt follow in their footsteps.
There’s no reason to doubt Mehsud’s determination to mount attacks in the U.S. His group has taken very big hits from the drone campaign. He’s looking for payback. America has to watch the TTP carefully.
LeT has the same intent but much greater capabilities. It has larger international networks and access to more sophisticated urban and educated recruits — people like Headley, who can move freely in American society. Its foreign operations tend to be better planned, often in collaboration with other groups, like al-Qaeda and Jaish.
Perhaps LeT’s greatest strength is the patronage it continues to receive from the Pakistani military and intelligence services. And it enjoys genuine popularity in large parts of the country, where it offers social services that the government cannot provide. After the devastating 2005 earthquake in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, LeT volunteers were often the first to arrive on the scene and provide valuable assistance. Like Hizballah in Lebanon, LeT and other Punjabi jihadist groups wield a combination of military and political power that makes them practically untouchable.
How can the Pakistani groups be combatted?
The Obama Administration’s best bet is to launch a “global takedown” of Pakistani jihadi cells outside Pakistan, especially in Britain, the U.S. and the Middle East. These external bases are the most threatening to the USA, much more than their operations in Pakistan.
As British authorities — who have had more experience with this challenge than those in the U.S. — know very well, such a takedown involves long, hard work by a host of law-enforcement agencies. And while the good guys are increasing their capabilities and understanding of the threats facing them, so are the bad guys. The Times Square bomb plot didn’t go as planned. But “we can’t rely on them to be bad bombmakers forever.”
By Bobby Ghosh
The ease with Faisal Shahzad was able to undergo bombmaking instruction during a visit to Pakistan has once again highlighted the country’s enduring reputation as the destination of choice for jihadist tourism. The claim by Pakistani government sources that Shahzad trained at a camp in North Waziristan will ratchet up pressure on Islamabad to crack down on militant groups that operate in zones of lawlessness on its soil, and to dismantle the infrastructure that continues to attract aspiring terrorists seeking to attack the West.
Although details of Shahzad’s ideological journey remain murky, Pakistanis who knew him say Shahzad came from a quietly religious family, and may only have become radicalized recently. “Last time when I met him,” retired schoolteacher Nazirullah Khan said, “he didn’t have a beard. I attended his wedding.” Shahzad’s possible links to Pakistani militant groups are under investigation, but some officials suspect that he may have had ties to Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), a banned terror group that began its life as a proxy of Pakistan’s intelligence services deployed to fight India in Kashmir. Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group responsible for the 2008 Mumbai massacre, is also being investigated as a possibility.
If suspicions of such links prove true, Shahzad’s case would hardly be the first time a Western walk-in has turned up in the midst of Pakistani jihadist groups. In October 2009, David Headley, another U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin, was arrested and later charged with helping plan the November 2008 Mumbai massacre. According to a plea agreement issued by the Justice Department in March, Headley made contact with al-Qaeda operatives during two trips to North Waziristan — the tribal area under limited central government authority, where Shahzad is also said to have received his training. North Waziristan is the only tribal area untouched thus far by Pakistan’s military offensives against its domestic Taliban insurgency, and the region is home to an assortment of jihadist groups that have working relationships with one another (including al-Qaeda). The Pakistani Army has deferred any offensive in the area, claiming limits on its capacity to take on such a mission right now, but the Times Square plot is likely to revive U.S. pressure for an offensive there.
Shahzad and similar volunteers who arrive from the West are believed by Pakistani analysts to have begun their radicalization before making contact with local militant groups. “Somehow, in Canada, Britain and the U.S., people get self-radicalized, then they try and get in touch with radical organizations, depending on their background,” says Amir Rana, director of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies. “If they are Pakistanis, they come here.” And the Internet has proved to be a powerful tool for both radicalization and recruitment. There’s so much available in cyberspace, it would scare you to death.
Any aspiring jihadist arriving in Pakistan is spoiled for choice when it comes to finding a militant group with which to sign up. Banned organizations such as LeT operate openly under different names, and it’s not very difficult for the determined volunteer militant to find his way to such groups. It’s like a drug addict arriving in a new town. They always figure out where to get their fix.
Recruits bearing Western citizenship are prized by terror groups, because their passports, education, facility with language and relative comfort with life in Western cities are largely absent among the young, impressionable madrasah students often chosen to carry out vicious bombings in Pakistan, Afghanistan or even India. The potential of these more cosmopolitan recruits to strike in the heart of the West further fuels jihadist fantasies. As Michael Chertoff, the former head of Homeland Security, said, “Unfortunately this is the kind of perfect mole for the terrorists. And this is why they’re recruiting people who … have clean records, are American citizens, have lived in America, because they want to take advantage of that cleanliness as a way of evading our defenses.”
Britain has had to deal with this problem since the July 2005 bombings of the London commuter system. Given the vast number of Britons of Pakistani origin who move back and forth between the two countries, policing the traffic has severely tested authorities. The U.S. is not immune: Headley was able to move undetected between America, India and Pakistan for nearly seven years. Clearly, a problem also exists with respect to the extent of coordination between Western intelligence agencies and their Pakistani counterparts.
Shahzad, had he been seeking to join up with militants in Pakistan, would have had two distinct advantages over other Western-based volunteers. Having spent the first 18 years of his life in Pakistan, he was at ease in the country. His family’s background in the northwest meant that he likely spoke Pashto, a rare asset. And the status of his father, retired senior air-force officer Bahar ul-Haq, is the sort of connection known to avert a suspicious gaze from law-enforcement agencies in Pakistan. If you are traveling in Waziristan, and you are stopped, the fact that you are an air-force vice marshal’s son can offer you protection.
But whatever training Shahzad may have received in Waziristan must have been mercifully poor judging by the multiple mistakes in the botched bombing attempt to which U.S. officials say he has confessed. Yet he’s unlikely to have been the only Western wannabe to have passed through these camps and then returned to the West to put his militant education to work.
by Omar Warraich
NEVER MIND 