Pat Dollard | Young Americans

It’s clear that the Global War on Terror will never succeed without a massive military showdown in the northwestern provinces of Pakistan. There is no way around this fact. And given that Pakistan’s military is not up to the task, it is clear that a massive foreign force will have to comprise the heart of any such campaign.

Given that every recent major terrorist plot, from Germany, to England to Scotland to Denmark, has been hatched and manned by Jihadis who trained and/or coordinated with Al Qaeda in Pakistan, and that recent reports in the Times of London have indicated that a radical Pakistani group is ginning up jihad in half of the mosques in London, and that Pakistan is battling an Al Qaeda/Taliban insurrection, it is indisputable that Pakistan is the absolute locus of Global Jihad, on a scale that Afghanistan under the Taliban only hinted at. It’s impossible to credibly argue that this situation can be left unchecked, and it is impossible to check it without a military campaign of sufficient size to annihiliate thousands of terrorists spread throughout the mountainous wilds of northwestern Pakistan. The following report is the latest example of the true scope of the menace that we face from Pakistan:

Sept. 9 (Bloomberg) — More than 80 percent of suicide bombers staging attacks in Afghanistan are trained, recruited or sheltered in neighboring Pakistan, the United Nations said in a report published today.

Only about half are Afghan nationals, with the remainder coming from Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Arab countries, according to the report, which analyzes suicide attacks in the country since the Taliban regime was ousted in 2001.

Suicide bombings are rising and won’t fall “as long as anti-government elements can rely upon Pakistani territory for the recruitment and training of operatives, for fundraising and safe havens,” said the report.

Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents are waging a guerrilla war in Afghanistan against the government of President Hamid Karzai, who has blamed Pakistan for failing to stop rebels crossing the mountainous border between the two countries. U.S. intelligence officials said in a report published in July that al-Qaeda has established a haven in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

The UN said its report is based on interviews with national and international intelligence, military and police officials, and with failed suicide attackers held at the Pul-e-Charki prison outside the Afghan capital, Kabul.

Religious Schools

Almost all suicide attackers in Afghanistan “undergo some form of training and preparation” in religious schools in Pakistan, known as madrassas, according to the report.

“Over 80 percent of suicide attackers pass through recruitment, training facilities or safe houses in North and South Waziristan en route to their targets inside Afghanistan,” the UN said, referring to Pakistani tribal districts.

Taliban groups around the Pakistani city of Quetta, of which there are about 30, are expected to produce one or two suicide attackers each this year, the UN added.

Only five suicide attacks took place in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2005, when they escalated to 17 during the course of the year, according to the report. Last year, there were 123 attacks and 103 this year up to the end of August.

Pakistan denies charges that it is failing to control al- Qaeda and Taliban fighters and points to the more than 80,000 soldiers it has deployed along the 2,430-kilometer (1,510-mile) border with Afghanistan.

In 2006, President Pervez Musharraf ordered religious schools to register with the government. A year earlier, he demanded they expel non-Pakistani students, after a U.K. investigation into the 2005 bombings in London showed that at least one of the suicide attackers visited a Pakistani madrassa.

`Ground Zero’

“The ground zero of terrorism has moved from Afghanistan to the tribal areas of Pakistan since 2001,” Rohan Gunaratna, head of the Singapore-based International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, said by telephone today.

``As long as al-Qaeda and the Taliban maintain a presence in the tribal areas there will be violence, not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan and beyond into Europe where there is a large Pakistani diaspora community,” he added.

Gunaratna, the author of “Inside Al-Qaeda: Global Network of Terror,” said the terrorist group had replicated the operational, training and support structures it built in Afghanistan, where it had the protection of the Taliban regime, in Pakistan’s tribal regions.