This NYT article talks about how the biggest terror threat facing Europe is emanating from Pakistan.
And I again ask the question: Why is this happening, considering President Pervez Musharraf is supposed to our BFF in the WOT? And what does it say about our chances to make Afghanistan a terror-haven-free zone within a generation, let alone a matter of years?
BARCELONA, Spain — As the terrorism suspects congregated in the largely Pakistani neighborhood here over the past few months, they were joined by a young man who called himself Asim. He had come from the Pakistani borderlands where the leadership of Al Qaeda is said to have regrouped.
The suspects, he later told Spanish investigators, envisioned a wave of spectacular attacks: Coordinated suicide bombings would start in this city’s vast subway system and then sweep through Portugal, Germany, France and Britain if certain demands were not met.
Asim had been sent to Spain to be a suicide bomber, but he also was an informant for French intelligence working in the no man’s land of Waziristan in Pakistan. After he got word to his handlers of an impending attack, Spain’s military police swooped into the neighborhood of Raval in the early hours of Jan. 19 and arrested 14 men. Now the officials unraveling the case say it demonstrates the growing threat of terrorist activities migrating to Continental Europe from Pakistan.
The largely Pakistani cell formed quickly in Barcelona with support, and perhaps direction, from the tribal areas of Pakistan, the authorities said. According to the arrest warrant in the case, three suicide bombing suspects arrived in Spain within the last four months and the bomb making suspect had recently spent five months in Pakistan.
With Spain preparing for elections next month, the suspected plot was an eerie echo of the March 11, 2004, Madrid transit bombings, which killed 191 people just days before the last election.
In the weeks since the arrests, Spanish officials have backed off their claim that an attack was imminent. They seized evidence like broken timing devices and small quantities of explosives. But they acknowledged that without more evidence of bomb making, they were relying heavily on the testimony of the informant to make their case, which had blown the cover of a rare intelligence source with access to Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Even so, in interviews, Spanish, American and other European officials — most speaking on condition of anonymity because the inquiry is not over — said the plot was indicative of the terror threat from Pakistan.
“That these people were ready to go into action as terrorists in Spain — that came as a surprise,” said Judge Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s highest antiterrorism magistrate. “In my opinion, the jihadi threat from Pakistan is the biggest emerging threat we are facing in Europe. Pakistan is an ideological and training hotbed for jihadists, and they are being exported here.”
That threat has been felt elsewhere. Two of four suicide bombers who attacked London’s transit system in July 2005 had trained at a camp in Pakistan. Four of the five British men convicted last April in a plot to blow up targets in London using fertilizer bombs were of Pakistani origin and some had trained at a makeshift terrorist camp there.
Last September, when the German authorities broke up what they suspected was a plot to bomb an American Air Force base and the Frankfurt airport, they said three of the suspects, two of them German citizens, had trained at terrorist camps in Pakistan.
Officials say the Barcelona case points to a more serious dynamic: Pakistanis with no apparent previous links to Europe who appear to have been sent there on a terrorist mission.
“We had 20 terrorists show up in Spain that had been trained in Pakistan that were going to be suicide bombers, fanning out over Europe,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, told the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Although some of the suspects had in fact been living in Spain, Mr. McConnell’s remarks underscored statements by the Spanish authorities that in addition to the 14 suspects who had been arrested, others had eluded arrest.
American officials acknowledged that they had monitored phone calls to Pakistan by some of the suspects, and Mr. McConnell cited the case as a reason that United States intelligence agencies needed to retain electronic surveillance authorities.
Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba of Spain compared the plot to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying: “It looks as if there is an international connection. There appears to be a boss outside.”
“Somebody sent this individual to Spain,” he added, referring to the informant.
Now, the Spanish authorities might have moved too soon and interrupted a rehearsal rather than a real attack. But that's in part due to panicky messages from the informant saying the Big One was imminent.
The article says the informant had seen far more bomb-making material, but that it may have disappeared with one suspect who is believed to have fled to the Netherlands.
Hopefully this guy isn't another Curveball, the Iraqi who told the U.S. what it wanted to hear about WMDs.
This guy invoked the name of Baitullah Mehsud, the militant Islamist from South Waziristan who some think may be behind the asssassination of of Pakistani opposition Benazir Bhutto.
The article had this:
While senior Western intelligence officials do not rule out the possibility that Mr. Mehsud or his organization supported the suspects, they are skeptical that he ordered the attack. And they are less certain that the suspects posed a real threat outside of Spain.