The Vicious War That Sent Shahzad to Times Square

It has been a hidden war ignored by the outside world. Up to last week nobody paid much attention to the fighting in north-west Pakistan, though more soldiers and civilians have probably been dying there over the last year than in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In reality this corner of Pakistan along the Afghan border is the latest in a series of wars originally generated by the U.S. response to 9/11. The first was the war in Afghanistan when the Taliban were overthrown in 2001, the second in Iraq after the invasion of 2003 and the third the renewed war in Afghanistan from about 2006. The fourth conflict is the present one in Pakistan and is as vicious as any of its predecessors, though so far the intensity of the violence has not been appreciated by the outside world.  

Western governments and media for long looked at the fighting in the tribal areas along Pakistan’s frontier with Afghanistan as a sideshow to the Afghan war. Washington congratulated itself on using pilotless drones to kill Taliban leaders, a tactic which meant that there were no American casualties and apparently no political fall out in the U.S.

This has now all changed since Faisal Shahzad attempted to detonate a bomb in Times Square in New York last week. Within days the U.S. press and television was camped outside the locked gate of his family’s compound in Peshawar, the effective capital of the north-west frontier region, and were trying to interview his relatives in the streets of his ancestral village of Mohib Banda outside the city.

The Pakistan Taliban had been saying that it would seek revenge for the drone attacks by striking directly at the U.S. but nobody took them seriously. Their first claim that they were behind the Times Square bomb was disbelieved as being beyond their capabilities. It is difficult to see why the idea of their involvement should have been treated with derision since suicide bombers from the Pakistan Taliban are blowing themselves up every few days along the north-west frontier.

Shahzad told his interrogators that he received training in Waziristan, though it cannot have been very serious given the amateurism of his subsequent efforts. But a high degree of technical expertise is not necessary since even the most botched and ineffective bomb attack has a powerful political impact so long as it happens in the U.S., as was demonstrated by the Nigerian student who tried and failed to blow up a plane over Detroit at Christmas by detonating explosives in his underpants.

One outcome of the abortive Times Square attack is that it has drawn the attention of the world to the seriousness of the fighting in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan which stretch along the Afghan border. Last year the violence there and in other parts of the North West frontier Province was enough to send 3.1 million refugees running for their lives. Many of these, particularly from the Swat valley, have now gone home, but hundreds of thousands of others are now taking flight because of army assaults on Pakistan Taliban strongholds elsewhere in FATA. These mass movements of people in obscure places like Orakzai or Kurram are hardly noticed even within Pakistan where they are reported without much detail on the inside pages of the newspapers.

The Pakistani foreign minister Makhdoom Qureyshi believes  that what happened in New York was "blowback" for the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan which he says killed 700 Pakistani civilians last year. This may be true but it is also hypocritical since the drones are launched from inside Pakistan and senior Pakistani security officials confirm that the information on the whereabouts of Taliban leaders, enabling the drones to target them, comes from Pakistani military intelligence (ISI) agents on the ground. Without the ISI involvement the drones would be ineffective.