Topic: Qaeda Network Expands Base In Pakistan

New York Times
December 30, 2007
Pg. 1
By Carlotta Gall
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 Ms. Bhutto, the former prime minister who died when a suicide bomb exploded as she left a political rally on Thursday.
According to American officials in Washington, an already steady stream of threat reports spiked in recent months. Many concerned possible plots to kill prominent Pakistani leaders, including Ms. 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 M. Gates told reporters in Washington on Dec. 21.
The expansion of Pakistan’s own militants, with their fortified links to Al Qaeda, presents a deeply troubling development 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 that Ms. Bhutto had begun to acknowledge in her many public statements about the greatest threat to her country being 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 Ms. Bhutto, or even conspiring to kill her.
On Saturday, Mr. 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, for having masterminded the attack. But on Saturday, through a spokesman, Mr. 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 but Pakistani tribesmen from border regions, as well as 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.
Senior American intelligence officials said all credible threat information in recent weeks had been 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 Ms. 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 Ms. 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 that danger, American lawmakers pressed for tighter government security around Ms. Bhutto. Senator Joseph R. 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 Mr. Musharraf at Ms. Bhutto’s request, urging him to increase her security.
The letter, written six days after the Oct. 18 bombing attempt on Ms. Bhutto’s life, urged Mr. Musharraf to provide her “the full level of security support afforded to any former prime minister,” including “bomb-proof vehicles and jamming equipment.”
After Ms. Bhutto’s death, Mr. 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. Those include a smaller number of hard-core Arabs, like 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, those 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 Ms. Bhutto’s assassination. “They are systematically targeting our state institutions in order to destabilize the country.”