The al-Qaeda network accused by Pakistan’s government of killing opposition leader Benazir Bhutto is increasingly made up not of foreign fighters but of homegrown Pakistani militants bent on destabilising the country, analysts and security officials here say.
In previous years, Pakistani militants directed their energies against American and Nato forces across the border in Afghanistan and avoided clashes with the Pakistani Army. But this year they have very clearly expanded their ranks and turned to a direct confrontation with the Pakistani security forces while also aiming at political figures like Ms Bhutto.
According to American officials in Washington, an already steady stream of threat reports spiked in recent months were on possible plots to kill prominent Pakistani leaders, including Ms Bhutto, President Pervez Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif, another opposition leader. Al-Qaeda right now seems to have turned its face toward Pakistan and attacks on its government and people, Defence Secretary Robert M Gates told reporters in Washington on December 21.
It is also one that many in Pakistan have been loath to admit, but that Ms Bhutto had begun to acknowledge in her many public statements about the greatest threat to her country being religious extremism and terrorism. Al-Qaeda in Pakistan now comprises not just foreigners but Pakistani tribesmen from border regions, as well as Punjabis and Urdu speakers and members of banned sectarian and Sunni extremists groups, Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times, wrote in a front-page analysis. “Al-Qaeda is now as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it is an Arab or foreign element,” he wrote. The tribes on the border have a long history of fighting invading armies. But since 2001, when these forces fled the American intervention in Afghanistan and took refuge in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the Pakistani militants have steadily grown.
Today they have been bolstered by the foreigners among them. The Arabs in particular have brought money as well as fighting and explosives expertise, as well as ideology that includes religious justifications of tactics like suicide bombings and beheadings, which Afghans and Pakistanis had not used before, they said. More and more, those tribes and foreign networks have overlapping operations and agendas.
