Pakistani Taliban Behind Times Sq. Plot, Holder Says/U.S. Urges Action in Pakistan After Failed Bombing/Heavy Drone Strikes Pound Western Pakistan

Pakistani Taliban Behind Times Sq. Plot, Holder Says
By JOSEPH BERGER
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 9, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10holder.html?hp


More firmly and publicly than before, senior officials of the Obama administration on Sunday blamed the failed attempt to blow up a bomb in Times Square on the Pakistani Taliban, an accusation that should increase pressure on the Pakistan military to attack the organization in its bastions in the lawless tribal region of North Waziristan.

“We’ve now developed evidence that shows the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in an interview on ABC television’s news program “This Week.”

Later, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said the Taliban in Pakistan “directed this plot” and may have also financed it. The Pakistani Taliban, he said, was “intimately involved” in the attempt on May 1 by Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, to blow up gasoline and propane tanks secreted inside a Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just yards from the heart of Times Square.

John Brennan, President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, echoed Mr. Holder’s statements Sunday morning, saying that it appeared that Mr. Shahzad, a resident of Bridgeport, Conn., who spent five months in Pakistan until February, was working for Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. The TTP is believed by some military intelligence officials to have joined forces with Al Qaeda and may be hiding some of its senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden, who was the motivating force behind the 9/11 attack.

Until now, American officials have speculated that the Pakistan Taliban may have trained Mr. Shahzad during his visit to Pakistan, but Sunday’s statements were their most definitive about the Taliban’s role.

The conclusion that the Pakistani Taliban is behind the attempted bombing “underscores the serious threat that we face from a very determined enemy,” Mr. Brennan said on CNN’s ”State of the Union.”

Mr. Shahzad, who was arrested at Kennedy International Airport aboard an Emirates Airlines airplane bound for Dubai little more than two days after the bomb was discovered, soon told police that he trained in Waziristan, the main base for the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda. Neither Mr. Holder nor Mr. Brennan indicated what new information led them to the firmer conclusions about the role of the Pakistani Taliban.






U.S. Urges Action in Pakistan After Failed Bombing
By JANE PERLEZ
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/world/asia/09pstan.html?th&emc=th


ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Obama administration has delivered new and stiff warnings to Pakistan after the failed Times Square car bombing that it must urgently move against the nexus of Islamic militancy in the country’s lawless tribal regions, American and Pakistani officials said.

The American military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, met with the Pakistani military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, at his headquarters here on Friday and urged Pakistan to move more quickly in beginning a military offensive against the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda in North Waziristan, Americans and Pakistanis familiar with the visit said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of continuing diplomatic efforts here.

The Pakistani-American man who admitted to the Times Square attack, Faisal Shahzad, 30, told American investigators that he had received training in North Waziristan, the main base for the Pakistani Taliban, Al Qaeda and other militant groups.

The new pressure from Washington was characterized by both the Pakistani and American officials as a sharp turnaround from the relatively polite encouragement adopted by the Obama administration in recent months. And it comes amid increasing debate within the administration about how to expand the American military’s influence — and even a boots-on-the-ground presence — on Pakistani soil.

Though the bombing in Times Square failed, Mr. Shahzad’s ability to move back and forth between the United States and Pakistan has heightened fears in the Obama administration that another attempt at a terrorist attack could succeed.

“We are saying, ‘Sorry, if there is a successful attack, we will have to act’ ” within Pakistan, one of the American officials said.

That issue has been a source of growing tension between the countries. Pakistani officials, already alarmed by the increase in American drone aircraft attacks against militants in northwestern Pakistan, have been extremely sensitive about any hint that American ground troops could become involved in the fight. And attempts by the United States to increase the presence of Special Operations forces there even in an advisory or training role have been met with great resistance by the Pakistanis.

The Pakistani military has stepped up its campaigns against militants in the past year, including an offensive in South Waziristan that has been praised by American officials. It has said that it is preparing to take up the fight against militants in North Waziristan. But Pakistani officials have insisted that the expanded campaign will happen completely on their own terms, and they have warned the Obama administration not to push so hard that it uses up the good will it has tried to foster here.

But the Americans’ urgency has been increasing on multiple fronts. With an intensified American military campaign raging against the Taliban next door in Afghanistan, and now with the renewed evidence of Pakistani sources for plots to attack on American soil, it was clear the Pakistani government had to do more, and more urgently, a senior American official said Saturday.

General Kayani, with whom General McChrystal has forged a positive relationship, was essentially told, “ ‘You can’t pretend any longer that this is not going on,’ ” another American official said. “ ‘We are saying you have got to go into North Waziristan.’ ”

The American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, met Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, after the failed bombing and used “forceful” language to convey the American point that the Pakistanis had to move more assertively against the militants threaded through the society, a Pakistani official said.

“The element of threat is definitely different from the last few months,” said Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani ambassador who also served in the United States. .

The Obama administration was planning to use the failed terrorist attack to impress on the Pakistanis of the urgency of getting American development aid in place in the tribal areas where militancy thrives, and into Karachi, the biggest city, where radical religious schools, known as madrasas, are popular.

“Last week’s incident makes it more urgent and more true” of the need to bring stability and security to these areas where the militants have multiplied, an American official said.

About $150 million was appropriated by Congress for assistance to the tribal areas in the coming period for reconstruction and other projects. But a host of problems, including American insistence on being able to monitor the money being spent, has made it a slow process.

Since Mr. Shahzad’s arrest in the Times Square attack, each country has, to some extent, blamed the other. Many Pakistanis insist that Mr. Shahzad is an American citizen who was radicalized in the United States by the difficulties he found living there as a Muslim. The Americans stress that Mr. Shahzad has traveled more than a dozen times back to Pakistan from the United States since 1999, and appeared to have received his military training in the epicenter of militancy, North Waziristan.

Mr. Shahzad’s background as the son of a senior Pakistani military officer has embarrassed the Pakistani Army, the most powerful institution in the country, and which receives generous financing from the United States. Mr. Shahzad’s father was a vice marshal in the Pakistani Air Force, and it appears that Mr. Shahzad grew up around senior military officers.

After Mr. Shahzad told American investigators that he was trained in bomb making in North Waziristan, the Pakistani Army tried to play down that claim, portraying it as unlikely.

The Pakistani Taliban took initial responsibility for the bombing attempt. Days later, though, their spokesman denied any involvement, a statement that may have been prompted by fears that their early claim of ownership of Mr. Shahzad might result in a direct attack on the North Waziristan enclave by the Americans, or the Pakistanis.



Heavy Drone Strikes Pound Western Pakistan
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: May 11, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/world/asia/12pstan.html?hp


KARACHI, Pakistan — In an unusually ferocious American attack on militants in Pakistan, about 18 missiles fired from pilotless aircraft killed at least 14 fighters and wounded four others on Tuesday in the tribal area of North Waziristan, a security official and a resident of the area said.

The missiles struck a region known as Datta Khel on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where Taliban and Qaeda fighters prepare for operations against United States and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

The drone attack was the third since a failed car bombing in Times Square 10 days ago.

Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American who was charged in the attempted attack, has told American investigators he visited North Waziristan to train under the auspices of the Pakistani Taliban.

There was no indication that the strikes on Tuesday were retaliation for the bombing attempt.

Rather, the attack by the American drones, which are operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared to be a continuation of the air campaign to degrade the capabilities of Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban fighters now working together in North Waziristan. There have been more than 30 drone attacks against militants in the tribal areas in 2010, almost all of them in North Waziristan.

A resident of Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, said in a telephone interview Tuesday he saw a truck stacked with empty coffins heading for Datta Khel after the attack.

According to this account, a missile hit a vehicle carrying four militants, and other missiles slammed into tents erected by the militants in the nearby Zair Ghudai area, close to the border with Afghanistan.

The intensity of the drone attacks in the past few months has forced militants to resort to more temporary quarters, like tents, and to keep on the move.

The resident said that six drones had been seen over Datta Khel and at least four were still hovering over the area after the attack in the early hours of Tuesday.

The militants killed in the attack belonged to the forces of Sadiq Noor, a commander who is loyal to the Haqqani network, which specializes in operations in Afghanistan, the resident said.

Militants loyal to Mr. Noor staged an ambush last month against Pakistani soldiers based in North Waziristan that killed at least seven soldiers, security officials said.