International Herald Tribune
Qaeda network expands base in Pakistan
By Carlotta Gall
Saturday, December 29, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: The Qaeda network accused by
Pakistan's government of killing the opposition leader
Benazir Bhutto is increasingly made up not of foreign
fighters but of homegrown Pakistani militants bent on
destabilizing the country, analysts and security
officials here say.
In previous years Pakistani militants directed their
energies against American and NATO forces across the
border in Afghanistan and avoided clashes with the
Pakistani Army.
But this year they have very clearly expanded their
ranks and turned to a direct confrontation with the
Pakistani security forces while also aiming at
political figures like Bhutto, the former prime
minister who died when a suicide bomb exploded as she
left a political rally Thursday.
According to American officials in Washington, an
already steady stream of threat reports spiked in
recent months. Many of concerned possible plots to
kill prominent Pakistani leaders, including Bhutto,
President Pervez Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, another
opposition leader.
"Al Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face
toward Pakistan and attacks on the Pakistani
government and Pakistani people," Defense Secretary
Robert Gates told reporters in Washington on Dec. 21.
The expansion of Pakistan's own militants and their
fortified links with Al Qaeda presents deeply
troubling developments for the Bush administration and
its efforts to stabilize this volatile nuclear-armed
country.
It is also one that many in Pakistan have been loath
to admit, but which Bhutto had begun to acknowledge in
her many public statements that the greatest threat to
her country lay in religious extremism and terrorism.
Those warnings have now been borne out with her death
and in the turmoil that has followed it and shaken
Pakistan's political fault lines. Rioting over the
last two days has left at least 38 people dead and 53
injured, and cost millions of dollars of damage to
businesses, vehicles and government buildings,
according an Interior Ministry spokesman. Protesters
have accused the government of failing to protect
Bhutto, or even conspiring to kill her.
On Saturday, Sharif, now the country's most prominent
opposition figure, ventured to the political
stronghold of his assassinated rival to lay a wreath
on her grave, but also to make common cause against
President Musharraf and the Bush administration's
support of him.
The government has tried to deflect that anger,
blaming militants linked to Al Qaeda, specifically
Baitullah Mehsud, as having masterminded the attack.
But on Saturday, through a spokesman, Mehsud denied he
was responsible and dismissed the allegations, adding
fuel to the notion of a government conspiracy.
"Neither Baitullah Mehsud nor any of his associates
were involved in the assassination of Benazir, because
raising your hand against women is against our tribal
values and customs," the spokesman, Maulavi Omar, said
in a telephone call from the tribal region of South
Waziristan. "Only those people who stood to gain
politically are involved in Benazir's murder," he
said.
One of Pakistan's leading newspapers, The Daily Times,
noted Saturday that such denials were a common tactic
used to obscure the origins of the militants' attacks,
and in particular to extend the myth that the bombings
are the work of foreign elements, rather than of
Pakistanis.
Al Qaeda in Pakistan now comprises not just foreigners
or even tribesmen from border regions, but also
Pakistan's own Punjabis and Urdu speakers and members
of banned sectarian and Sunni extremists groups, Najam
Sethi, editor of The Daily Times, wrote in a
front-page analysis. "Al Qaeda is now as much a
Pakistani phenomenon as it is an Arab or foreign
element," he wrote.
The American officials said all credible threat
information in recent weeks was passed to Pakistani
authorities, mainly through the United States Embassy
in Islamabad. But the officials said they were not
aware of any specific reports of an attempt on
Bhutto's life in Rawalpindi.
A senior American intelligence official said it was
clear from his reading of recent threat reports that
"the political process was not going to go untouched,"
adding that militants almost surely would go to any
length "to create political disarray."
And while Bhutto had perhaps the longest list of
enemies among Pakistan's most prominent politicians,
the official said, "It almost didn't matter which one
was attacked Musharraf, Bhutto or Sharif. The
militants were looking for multiple target sets,
whether in the capital area, which would carry more
weight, or in Karachi or Peshawar."
In the face of this danger, American lawmakers pressed
for tighter government security around Bhutto. Senator
Joseph Biden Jr., a Delaware Democrat who heads the
Foreign Relations Committee and who is running for
president, released a letter last week that he and two
Senate colleagues had written to Musharraf at Bhutto's
request, urging him to increase her security.
The letter, written five days after the Oct. 19
bombing attempt on Bhutto's life, urged Musharraf to
provide her "the full level of security support
afforded to any former prime minister," including
"bomb-proof vehicles and jamming equipment."
After Bhutto's death, Biden said in a statement, "The
failure to protect Ms. Bhutto raises a lot of hard
questions for the government and security services
that must be answered." But a Defense Department
official said Saturday, "I don't know how foolproof
you can make any security when people are willing to
kill themselves."
The tribes on the border have a long history of
fighting invading armies. But since 2001, when Qaeda
and Taliban forces fled the American intervention in
Afghanistan and took refuge in Pakistan's tribal
areas, the Pakistani militants have steadily grown in
strength and boldness.
Today they have been bolstered by the foreigners among
them. These include a smaller number of hard-core
Arabs, such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri,
Al Qaeda's second in command, as well as a larger
number of Uzbeks, Tartars and Tajiks who have
influence them to take on new agendas, Pakistani
security officials familiar with the region said.
The Arabs in particular have brought money and
fighting and explosives expertise, as well as ideology
that includes religious justifications of tactics like
suicide bombings and beheadings, which Afghans and
Pakistanis had not used before, they said.
More and more these local tribes and foreign networks
have overlapping operations and agendas.
"The country is facing the gravest challenge from
these terrorists and extremist elements," Brig. Javed
Iqbal Cheema, the director of the National Crisis
Management Cell and main spokesman for the Interior
Ministry, said Friday as he accused Al Qaeda of
Bhutto's assassination. "They are systematically
targeting our state institutions in order to
destabilize the country."
Mehsud, he said, was of the "same brand of Al Qaeda
and Taliban terrorists," and was "behind most of the
recent terrorist attacks that have taken place in
Pakistan."
Some security officials in the North-West Frontier
Province have warned, however, that it has become the
norm for the government to blame Mehsud for just about
any attack, without providing real evidence.
Mehsud is in fact one commander in a broader terrorist
network who runs just one of an estimated five groups
that train and dispatch suicide bombers from
Pakistan's isolated tribal areas, according to
officials.
Another man known to be sending out suicide bombers is
Qari Zafar, a militant from southern Punjab who was
connected to the banned Sunni extremist group
Sipa-e-Sahaba and then Jaish-e-Muhammad.
Zafar escaped capture in Karachi and is now based in
South Waziristan, where he trains insurgents on how to
rig roadside bombs and vests for suicide bombings, a
former security official said.
But it is Mehsud who has emerged this year as the most
visible proponent of Al Qaeda's ambitions in Pakistan,
security officials said. He has claimed to have
hundreds of suicide bombers ready to attack government
and military targets.
Barely two years ago Mehsud, 32, was just a Pashtun
tribesman who did not register on the radar screen of
the intelligence services or government officials. He
is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan in the 1990s,
when he trained and fought with the Taliban, according
to one Pakistani intelligence official.
He became a follower of Abdullah Mehsud, the
one-legged commander who was captured when fighting
with the Taliban in 2001 in Afghanistan and detained
by the United States at its military base in
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Abdullah Mehsud was later
released and took up the fight against American forces
in Afghanistan from his home base in South Waziristan.
Both Abdullah and Baitullah share the name of the
Mehsud of South Waziristan, a large warrior Pashtun
tribe that is renowned for never being pacified by the
British forces.
Abdullah Mehsud was killed in July by Pakistani forces
in Zhob, a district south of the tribal areas in the
province of Baluchistan. But even before then,
Baitullah Mehsud had been promoted over him by the
Taliban leadership.
Baitullah Mehsud is now believed to be responsible for
some of the most spectacular and damaging attacks
inside Pakistan recent months, including suicide
bombings against army and intelligence targets as well
as prominent politicians like Bhutto.
He has also been named by officials in Afghanistan as
one of the main sources of the suicide bombers who
carry out attacks there.
But Mehsud's master strike came at the end of July
when he captured nearly 300 soldiers who were
escorting a supply convoy through the Mehsud lands in
Waziristan. He beheaded three soldiers and demanded
that the government withdraw from his area and cease
operations against militants.
It took the government two months of negotiations to
win the release of the soldiers. Only on Nov. 3 did it
do so. As part of the deal the government handed over
25 of Mehsud's men on the same day that President
Musharraf imposed emergency rule, saying he needed the
extra powers to combat terrorists.
Since then, however, the government, wary of the
retaliatory attacks he can employ, appears to have
done little to rein in Mehsud. He now leads
Tehrik-i-Taliban, a newly formed coalition of Islamic
militants committed to waging holy war against the
Pakistani government.
The government has outlawed the group but not moved
against it. The army has concentrated its effect
instead in recent weeks on clearing militants from the
Swat Valley. That region is some distance from the
tribal areas on the border, and the fight there an
indication of just how far the militant influence has
spread.
Pakistani officials who have worked in the tribal
areas say that it is still possible to contain the
threat of someone like Mehsud through tribal pressure,
if he can be separated from the foreign elements. "The
only problem is these foreigners," the official said,
speaking on condition of anonymity. "You remove these
foreigners and the rest is no problem."
Yet to remove the foreigners, namely a small number of
Arab leaders, who are well protected and well hidden,
from among the tribesmen is a task that Pakistan so
far has failed to do and according to some may not be
capable of. "That can only be done with an operation,"
the official said.
Notes:
International Herald Tribune Copyright © 2008 The
International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
---------------
Jusfiq Hadjar gelar Sutan Maradjo Lelo
Allah yang disembah orang Islam tipikal dan yang digambarkan oleh al-Mushaf itu
dungu, buas, kejam, keji, ganas, zalim lagi biadab hanyalah Allah fiktif.
__________________________________________________________
Sent from Yahoo! Mail - a smarter inbox http://uk.mail.yahoo.com
Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/
<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional
<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/join
(Yahoo! ID required)
<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
