The Pakistani Taliban's top leaders

After the failed car bomb attack in New York City’s Times Square, the Pakistani Taliban have suddenly risen to the top of the list of concerns for Western intelligence and law enforcement officials. The Pakistan Taliban’s claim for the failed attack was initially ignored, but the resulting investigation has pointed back to the group’s involvement. This has forced US officials to admit that the Pakistani group is more than just a local insurgent outfit aiming at overthrowing the Pakistani government.

Although the Pakistani Taliban has only recently been recognized as a threat to the US homeland, the group has for years conducted operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan and sheltered al Qaeda and a host of regional and international terror groups. Al Qaeda’s external operations network has been based in territory ruled by the Pakistani Taliban, yet strangely, most Western observers have not seen the Pakistani Taliban as a direct threat.

The largest Taliban faction in Pakistan is known as the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, or the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan. This is an alliance of 28 Taliban groups located in Pakistan’s tribal areas and the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the Northwest frontier Province). There are also several other major Taliban groups, mainly in North Waziristan, that are not members of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan but that have remained closely allied with the grooup.

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Terrorists May Have New Focus on Striking U.S.

The failed bombing in New York's Times Square is a possible signal that militant leaders in Pakistan have shifted their focus to targets in the U.S. and other Western countries instead of sticking to their home base, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials. The attack, they also warned, could be only the first by terrorist groups that seek to avoid detection by using simpler methods that are more independently planned. U.S. investigators and intelligence agencies are trying to establish whether accused bomber Faisal Shahzad was trained or recruited for the Times Square operation by any Pakistan-based terrorist organization, including the Pakistani Taliban. Shahzad, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, spent five months in Pakistan before returning to the United States in February and preparing his attack. If those suspicions prove correct, it suggests that groups based in Pakistan, including the Taliban along the Afghan border, may be taking on a more global approach after years of focusing attacks largely on government or coalition forces in their region. That focus could stem from the Taliban's continued close association with senior Al Qaeda leaders, who are believed to be hiding in the lawless regions on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. One counterterrorism official said the groups were "deadly enemies of the United States" BEFORE the U.S. began destroying their leadership, fighters, and camps from the air.

The counterterrorism officials say the Times Square attempt also shows a continuing shift to opportunistic attacks by the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups that don't have much money for overseas operations. So they use whatever method they can afford, wherever they happen to find a willing operative. As a result, U.S. authorities must figure out how to deal with less predictable patterns of behavior. The officials say one major concern is that terrorist groups could send people to the U.S. to train homegrown extremists instead of people going to Pakistan or elsewhere for training. Juan Zarate, President George W. Bush's former deputy national security adviser, agreed that the Times Square attack may mark a new chapter in the terrorist threat. "The model may be shifting here, in part because they may have made a calculus that it's much more difficult to have a big ticket attack, and secondly, they may have moved to a model of disruption rather than destruction."

• "Officials Consider New Tactics to Keep Pace With Evolving Terror Threat", Fox News, 5/9/10.
  

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Pakistani Taliban Are Said to Expand Alliances

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 say. A man linked to the Times Square bombing suspect was arrested at the Bat'ha Mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, known for its ties to the group Jaish-e-Muhammad.

Since the group’s formation in 2007, the main mission of the Pakistani Taliban has been to maintain their hold on territory in Pakistan’s tribal areas to train fighters for jihad against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan and, increasingly, to strike at the Pakistani state as the military pushes into these havens. Pakistan’s military offensives and intensifying American 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.

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U.S. Believes Pakistani Taliban Leader Is Dead

U.S. counterterrorism officials believe Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud is dead following a missile attack last month, a senior intelligence official said Wednesday in the strongest signal that Washington has offered about the militant's fate. Neither Pakistan nor the U.S. has officially confirmed the death of Mehsud, who commands an Al Qaeda-allied movement that is blamed for scores of suicide bombings and is suspected in a deadly attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan late last year. Mehsud's death would be the latest successful strike against suspected terrorists by the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. has recently stepped up attacks from unmanned aircraft in Pakistan, and a closer collaboration with Yemen has led to recent airstrikes there. President Barack Obama highlighted the increasing success of such attacks in his State of the Union address last week.

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Taliban Use Pakistani City as Hub for Lucrative Organized Crime

Taliban fighters have long used Karachi, a city of 17 million, as a place to regroup, smuggle weapons and even work seasonal jobs. But recently they have discovered another way to make fast money: organized crime.

The police here say the Taliban, working with criminal groups, are using Mafia-style networks to kidnap, rob banks and extort, generating millions of dollars for the militant insurgency in northwestern Pakistan. “There is overwhelming evidence that it’s an organized policy,” said Dost Ali Baloch, assistant inspector general of the Karachi police.

Jihadi-linked crime has surfaced in other Pakistani cities, like Lahore. But Karachi, the central nervous system of Pakistan’s economy, and home to its richest businessmen, is the hub. It has been free of the bombings that have tormented Pakistan’s other major cities this year, and some officials believe that is the result of a calculated strategy.

“This is where they come to hide, where they raise their finances,” said a counterterrorism official in Karachi. “They don’t want to disturb that.” The danger is not of a Taliban takeover — Karachi is run by a powerful secular party that despises the Taliban — but of an urban sanctuary for financing and equipping the insurgency from this southern port.

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Pakistani Taliban Confirm Leader Died In U.S. Strike

The Pakistani Taliban acknowledged that the militants' top leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was dead, ending weeks of claims and counterclaims over his fate following a U.S. missile strike on his father-in-law's home this month.

The Taliban had insisted for weeks that Baitullah Mehsud was still alive following the missile strike, while U.S. and Pakistani officials said he was almost certainly dead and a leadership struggle had ensued.

Two of Mehsud's top aides, Hakimullah Mehsud and Waliur Rehman, called The Associated Press to say that he had died last Sunday of wounds from the Aug. 5 strike near the Afghan border. "He was wounded. He got the wounds in a drone strike and he was martyred two days ago," Hakimullah Mehsud said. Rehman later repeated the same statement.

Both also confirmed an earlier Taliban announcement that Hakimullah Mehsud (pictured) now leads the Pakistani Taliban, while Rehman would lead the movement's wing in South Waziristan.

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