Mar 16, 2008
Report: Islamabad Blast Target Was FBI’s Pakistan Operations Chief
ARY One World, a leading Pakistani news channel, claims that the intended target of Saturday’s Islamabad bombing was the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations operations chief in Pakistan. Meanwhile, ABC News states that the FBI’s attache at the US embassy, injured in the blast, is the top FBI agent in the country. His name differs from that provided by ARY. Reuters reports that four FBI agents were injured in the blast.
Has the Bureau’s operations in Pakistan has been compromised? There is a significant likelihood of linkage between Saturday’s attacks and Tuesday’s twin blasts in Lahore. Tuesday’s attacks targeted an FBI-trained unit of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Authority (FIA) and a clandestine FIA safe house, said to be visited by U.S. intelligence agents, where terror suspects were interrogated. That a secret FIA installation was hit suggests that, at the very least, an inside source provided information on the targets to the terrorists. And so it’s possible the same source also gave information on the FBI personnel in Islamabad.
The FIA-FBI partnership, so it seems, has been targeted twice in one week. Therefore it is possible that it will be a target again. An FBI forensics team is currently assisting with investigations in Lahore. An unidentified Pakistani intelligence official told the German Press Agency that the FBI team also has been investigating similar attacks in Iraq; the Lahore FIA attacks are believed to bear similarities with attacks there.
What lies ahead? Will the terrorists continue to target the FIA-FBI nexus? Or will they diversify their targets, including other components of U.S.-Pakistan anti-terror cooperation, including military trainers and, even, aid workers? As we noted yesterday, Maulana Faqir Muhammad of the Pakistani Taliban criticized the U.S. plan to train the Frontier Corps, calling it “an insult to one of the world’s best trained armies.”
I think it’s not long before we start seeing the diversification in the Taliban targets – in Iraq, we saw insurgents and especially al-Qaeda in Iraq go from targeting Iraqi Security Forces and U.S. soldiers to large-scale attacks to cause systematic unrest and maximum civilian casualties. In Swat, the “Radio Mullah,” in the campaign to take the valley, began using more cruel atrocities like beheadings in order to reach their end state. In the psychology behind their justification of these attacks, what is deemed legitimate becomes much broader as time goes on – in the beginning anyone related to the U.S. or the Musharraf government was a credible target. Eventually, anyone not allied with them is fair game.
I actually just discussed the evolution of Baitullah Mehsud in my recent post: http://www.changinguppakistan.com.
[...] the Pakistani military dictatorship co-opted the US counter-insurgency. Further, when things like this happen, you’ve got to consider the risk that somebody wants a spiral of intervention, attacks [...]