Terrorist massacre of children ‘blowback’ from U.S.-backed Pakistani offensive against Taliban, officials say
Former Pakistani ambassador to Washington calls his government’s military strategy ‘inadequate’
The Pakistani Taliban assault on a school — killing 145, including 132 children — appears to be ”blowback” from a months-long Pakistani military offensive against the terror group that was encouraged and supported by the U.S. government, Pakistani and U.S. officials said today.
The Pakistani military launched the offensive last June, killing more than 1,800 militants as well as an unknown number of civilians, in the group’s hideouts in North Waziristan.
Just last month, Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, visited Washington for consultations on the offensive. U.S. officials seemed modestly optimistic that the Pakistani Taliban — formally known as Tehrik-e-Taliban, or the TTP — was “under pressure” and on the run, a U.S intelligence official told Yahoo News.
But today’s assault in Peshawar — using suicide bombers disguised in military uniforms who lobbed hand grenades and fired indiscriminately at schoolchildren — was a sign that the group was far from decimated and still capable of spectacular attacks. “The scope and scale of this is unprecedented,” the U.S. official said.
“This was blowback we have been expecting for some time,” said Jalil Abbas Jilani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, in a radio interview on “The Diane Rehm Show” Tuesday about the attack on the school.
The “blowback” theory was underscored by a statement from the TTP’s own spokesman, Mohammed Umar Khorasani. He called the assault “a revenge attack” for the army offensive, adding: “We targeted the school because the army targets our families. We want them to feel our pain.”
But despite Pakistani vows to strike back — the country’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, immediately flew to Peshawar and called for an emergency meeting of all political parties — there were questions about whether the country’s military has the capability and will to take meaningful action against what one analyst called “a spider web of terrorist groups” throughout the country.
Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. who worked closely with Obama administration officials, said his country’s military offensive was flawed from the outset.
“It seems the Pakistani effort has been inadequate,” he told Yahoo News in an interview. The offensive was announced well in advance and “too well publicized,” giving key TTP leaders an opportunity to flee and escape the brunt of the attacks.
More important, his country continues to have a selective attitude toward terrorist groups within the country’s borders, he said. While going after the TTP — which has been focused on overthrowing the Pakistani government — it continues to protect or turn a blind eye to others, including most notably Jamaat-ud-Dawa, or JUD, a purported front group for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terror organization that mounted the 2008 attack on Mumbai, killing 166 people, including six Americans.
The U.S. government has blacklisted JUD as a global terrorist organization and has long complained that the Pakistani military’s intelligence service, the ISI, has aided the group. (In federal court testimony in Chicago in 2010, a key government witness, David Coleman Headley, testified that he helped carry out the Mumbai attacks under the direction of an ISI handler.)
Yet just this month, Hafiz Saeed — the leader of JUD, who has a $10 million U.S. government bounty on his head — staged a public rally in Lahore, Pakistan, with no response from the Pakistani government.
“It’s like the Mafia,” said Haqqani about the terror groups in Pakistan, comparing them to American criminal organizations in different cities, with separate leaders acting in close cooperation with each other. “Each of these groups helps the other.
“It’s time for Pakistan to recognize it must go after all of them,” he said.
