March 14, 2007
Pakistani Militants Hit Targets Close to Home
By CARLOTTA GALL
PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Along the Afghan border, not far from this northwestern city, Islamic militants have used a firm foothold over the past year to train and dispatch suicide bombers against American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
But in recent weeks the suicide bombers have turned on Pakistan itself, carrying out six attacks and killing 35 people. Militant leaders have threatened to unleash scores more, in effect opening a new front in their war.
Diplomats and concerned residents see the bombings as proof of a spreading "Talibanization," as Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, calls it, which has seeped into more settled districts of Pakistan from the tribal areas along the border, where the Taliban and Al Qaeda have made a home.
In Peshawar and other parts of North-West Frontier Province, which abuts the tribal areas, residents say English-language schools have received threats, schoolgirls have been warned to veil themselves, music is being banned and men are told not to shave their beards.
Then there is the mounting toll of the suicide bombings. One of the most lethal killed 15 people in Peshawar, most of them police officers, including the popular police chief.
The police, on the front line of the violence, have suffered most in many of the suicide attacks, diplomats and officials say. They are increasingly demoralized and cowed, allowing the militancy to spread still further, they warn.
In Tank, a town close to the lawless tribal area of South Waziristan, where militants have their own Taliban ministate, the police have taken off their uniforms, essentially ceding control to the militants, who now use the town as a logistics supply base, according to one Western diplomat in Pakistan.
"It's not good," he said. "You have ungovernable space and the impact is expanding ungovernable space."
Suicide bombings are not new in Pakistan. There have been several high-profile cases linked to Al Qaeda in which bombers have tried to kill General Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, and singled out foreign targets, French engineers and the United States Consulate in Karachi.
But the indiscriminate terror, sown by lone bombers, with explosives strapped to their chests wandering into a crowd, is a new experience for Pakistanis, and it has shocked and angered many here.
"Are these attacks isolated incidents of fanatic wrath, or is it some widespread coordinated effort to intimidate the state itself?" asked The Nation, a daily newspaper, in an editorial after the latest bombing against an antiterrorist judge in Multan. "Coordinated or not, these are dangerous times to be seen as representatives of the state; the militants are driving home a point."
The attacks all stem from the tribal area of Waziristan, according to a senior government official, who asked not to be identified because investigations are continuing. There, he said, groups supporting jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan, sectarian groups and militant splinter cells have morphed into a kind of hydra.
"They are all there in South Waziristan's Wana region," the official said. "It's no longer an Afghan-only problem. It has become as much a Pakistan problem too."
Still, it remains unclear if there is a single strategy behind the suicide bombings. Some have been apparently sectarian in nature, part of a decades-old problem in Pakistan between extremist Shiite and Sunni groups.
But militants allied with the Taliban and Al Qaeda appear to be behind four of the six most recent attacks, acting in retaliation for military strikes by Pakistani forces against their groups in the tribal regions.
Of those, at least three attacks can be traced back to Baitullah Mehsud, a militant commander based in South Waziristan, who is known to have sent suicide bombers from his mountain redoubt to Afghanistan, police officials said.
Mr. Mehsud, a former fighter with the Taliban, said his main desire was to fight United States-led coalition and NATO forces in Afghanistan. He entered into a peace deal with the Pakistani government in 2005, agreeing not to attack Pakistani forces, as long as he could continue his jihad across the border.
But under increasing pressure from the United States, and acting on a tip from American intelligence, Pakistani authorities sent helicopters to strike at a presumed hide-out of his followers on Jan. 6, killing eight people.
Mr. Mehsud vowed revenge, and several of the recent suicide bombings are believed to be in retaliation.
A suicide bomb attack on a military convoy on Jan. 22 was carried out by Mr. Mehsud's men. Another attack by a bomber on the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on Jan. 26, which killed a policeman, was attributed to Mr. Mehsud as well. So was an attack that killed a policeman in Dera Ismail Khan on Jan. 29, police officials say.
General Musharraf vowed at a Feb. 2 news conference to go after Mr. Mehsud. But the governor of North-West Frontier Province, Ali Muhammad Jan Aurakzai, preferred to send a delegation of elders to talk to him. The militant commander later denied any involvement, but the bombings slowed.
Mr. Mehsud may also have orchestrated the suicide attack here, in the old city of Peshawar on Jan. 27, when a bomber approached police officers on foot and detonated himself as they were organizing security for the Shiite festival to mark Muharram.
Police investigators say the method, grenade lot numbers and other explosives used were identical to those in previous attacks. DNA tests also showed that all the bombers were 17 to 20 years old, they said.
But a security official said other leads pointed more to another militant group, Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi aimed at setting up Shariah, or Islamic law, which is active in the tribal areas north of Peshawar.
The movement closely supports the Taliban and is linked to Al Qaeda. It was almost certainly behind the suicide bombing that killed 44 military cadets in November in Dargai, in retaliation for an airstrike against a religious school run by one of its members in the tribal area of Bajaur.
The group had been training suicide bombers, Pakistan's interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, said after the Bajaur strike.
The attack on the cadets was a major escalation on the militants' part. It was apparently aimed at the army as an institution, rather than its top leaders, whom the militants blame for pro-American policies. The target, too, was an easy one -- the cadets were unarmed, on an open playing field.
"They are attempting to make it clear to Pakistan's security establishment that their strength has yet to be sapped," a private policy group based in the United States, Strategic Forecasting Inc., wrote at the time.
The militant group remains active and may be behind some other attacks in the frontier region, a Western diplomat said. They and other militants are also trying, with increasing effect, to intimidate populations beyond the tribal areas.
A girls' high school in Mardan was recently warned that the girls should veil themselves or stay home, a tactic typical of groups like Tehreek Nifaz-e-Shariat Mohammadi. Four English language schools closed for four days last month after the police learned of another possible threat.
"These are acts of terror to psychologically defeat the people to accept the force of the Taliban and the ways of the Taliban," said Latif Afridi, an opposition politician and a member of the provincial bar association in Peshawar.
The creeping militancy has frustrated government agencies, who disagree over what to do about it, according to one intelligence official.
There is consensus that a large-scale military operation, like the kinds that have failed in recent years, is not the solution. But some diplomats say that the series of peace deals that the government struck with tribal leaders and militants in South and North Waziristan has not worked either.
For instance, according to another Western diplomat, General Musharraf knows the North Waziristan agreement is only 20 to 30 percent effective, but he continues to back it for lack of another plan.
The accord has brought some order to the area's capital, Miram Shah, according to officials with knowledge of North Waziristan. It has also forced a split among the militants, with the more aggressive followers of Mr. Mehsud and their Qaeda allies congregating in the town of Mir Ali, they said.
Some officials are now arguing that the government should move against the militants in Mir Ali, while supporting the more reasonable ones.
One practical solution is to train local tribesmen to buttress the Frontier Corps, which polices the tribal areas and could be used as a buffer to protect the settled neighboring districts.
Hundreds of recruits from Waziristan are already training in border and customs control, among other things, under a program sponsored by the United States Department of Justice, according to an American diplomat. But it is not clear whether the program will succeed.
While local men would be more acceptable to the tribesmen, their sympathies may well lie with the militants, and the Frontier Corps has been accused of turning a blind eye to the militants' cross-border activities.
Meanwhile, the problems continue to spread to other part of the tribal areas, and beyond.
"Taliban militants have emerged in Kurram, as well as Orakzai," said Mr. Afridi, the opposition politician, referring to other tribal regions. "They are trying to emerge in Mohmand."
"In my area the clouds of Taliban and civil war are in sight," he added. "We are worried, we really are."