Washington, May 05: The thwarted car bomb plot in New York could lead to a broader US view of Pakistani extremists, with fears growing that an array of overlapping groups are determined to attack the United States.
Prosecutors said Tuesday that Pakistani-American attack suspect Faisal Shahzad admitted training in bomb-making in Waziristan, the mountainous region seen as a leading hotbed for Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.
The attempt to wreak havoc in bustling Times Square came as Pakistani Taliban supremo Hakimullah Mehsud — who US officials earlier thought died in a missile strike — resurfaced in videos and vowed to attack US cities.
US and Pakistani officials initially rejected out of hand a claim of responsibility for the New York plot posted by Mehsud’s group on YouTube. But investigators have grown more cautious as details emerged in Shahzad’s case.
If confirmed to be the Taliban, it would mark a significant foray into international operations for a movement long seen as primarily a local force interested in imposing an austere brand of Islam.
But experts said that the distinctions among militant groups in Pakistan are increasingly being blurred.
Lisa Curtis, a South Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation who served in former president George W. Bush’s administration, said it may take time to discern Shahzad’s affiliations and intentions “given the increasing fluidity of group membership and cross-pollination of the various terrorist groups.”
The United States initially zeroed in on Al-Qaeda as it entered Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
President Barack Obama took office pledging last year to expand the focus to Pakistan, where many Al-Qaeda figures are believed to have fled.
The Obama administration in recent months has welcomed what it sees as growing efforts by Pakistan to battle extremists in the northwest near Afghanistan, in which US-led forces have stepped up their anti-Taliban offensive.
But the United States has also urged Pakistan to fight other militants such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, the virulently anti-Indian group based accused in the grisly assault on Mumbai in 2008.
“The greatest challenge for US policymakers is convincing Pakistan to deal firmly and unambiguously with all terrorists, even those who are targeting Pakistan’s arch-rival India,” Curtis said.
Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who led a review of regional strategy for Obama, said that the threat to the United States in recent months has been coming not just from Al-Qaeda itself but from a range of sympathetic groups.
Al-Qaeda “has asked all of its allies in the global Islamic jihad, like the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, and its franchises around the Muslim world, including the one in Yemen, to help it find killers and press the war on America,” Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on the think-tank’s blog.
Attacks on the United States involving Pakistan are hardly new. Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani angry at US foreign policy, in 1993 shot two CIA employees in their cars near the agency’s headquarters. He was executed nine years later.
But a growing number of high-profile cases have come to light. Last year, US authorities arrested David Headley — an American whose father was formerly a Pakistani diplomat — for helping scout out sites for the Mumbai attacks.
Reflecting recent improvements in the tone of relations, Pakistan and the United States pledged to work together on the Times Square case.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said that US officials are “working closely” with Islamabad and “appreciate Pakistan’s pledge of full cooperation.”
Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, told CNN that his nation has also suffered from extremists and would “stand by the side of the United States.”
“Pakistanis want to defeat terrorism as much as Americans do,” Haqqani said.
—-Agencies