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A Bold Counterpunch Shows Taliban’s Lasting Strength A Bold Counterpunch Shows Taliban’s Lasting Strength
(about 4 hours later)
LONDON — Only weeks ago, the Pakistani Taliban appeared to be on the ropes. Violent rivalries split the insurgency in two. Peace talks with the government collapsed. Military jets pounded militant hide-outs in the tribal belt. LONDON — Only a week ago, the Pakistani Taliban appeared to be on the ropes. Violent rivalries had split the insurgency in two. Peace talks with the government had collapsed. Military jets had pounded militant hideouts in the tribal belt.
And so, with a point to prove, the Taliban hit back. Then on Sunday, the Taliban hit back.
On Sunday night, 10 militant fighters, disguised as government security forces and armed with rocket launchers and suicide vests, stormed the Karachi airport. They came with food, water and ammunition, in apparent preparation for a long siege, but also with big ambitions: perhaps to hijack a commercial airliner, government officials said on Monday, or to blow up an oil depot, or to destroy airplanes on the tarmac. A squad of militant commandos, disguised as government security forces, stormed Karachi’s international airport after dark. They carried food, water and ammunition, apparently in preparation for a long siege, and big ambitions: perhaps to hijack a commercial airliner, government officials said Monday, or to blow up an oil depot, or to destroy airplanes on the tarmac.
Paramilitary guards pinned the fighters down in a cargo terminal, in a firefight that blazed through the night. After five hours, as stranded passengers waited anxiously in parked airplanes, it was over, with 29 people dead and the cargo building on fire. The 10 attackers were dead five hours later, shot by soldiers or blown up by their own suicide vests. Yet the audacious nature of the assault shook Pakistan to its core, offering a violent reminder that, for all its divisions, the Taliban remains an astonishingly resilient force.
Yet the audacious assault shook the country to its core. It showed how, despite the Taliban’s challenges and deepening divisions, their reach has extended far from their tribal redoubt into Pakistan’s biggest city. With several jihadists from Uzbekistan among the dead, the attack also demonstrated how the Taliban can still draw on an international militant network to conduct sophisticated operations against high-profile targets across the country. It has kept a reach far beyond its tribal redoubt along the Afghan border, with an ability to penetrate the country’s busiest airport in the largest city. And the discovery that Uzbek jihadis were among the attackers underscores how, even in splinters, the Taliban can draw on an international militant network to conduct sophisticated attacks on high-profile targets — which means trouble not just for Pakistan’s government and military, but for American interests in Afghanistan.
And it may be a sign of more violence to come. The ambitious attack is also being widely taken as bearing out the warning of counterterrorism experts that when the Pakistani Taliban split two weeks ago, it was unlikely to erode their capacity for mayhem.
“This marks an escalation of the war,” said Adil Najam, the dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. “And it shows that this is going to be a long war.” “It’s become a hydra-headed monster,” said Najmuddin Shaikh, a retired head of Pakistan’s foreign service. “They had limited success in Karachi, but maybe that was just our good luck.”
The spokesman for the main Pakistani Taliban faction, Shahidullah Shahid, said as much, calling the strike in Karachi “a response to the recent attacks by the government.” And even as he said the group was still interested in talking peace with the government, he promised that, in the meantime, “We will continue carrying out such attacks.” The Taliban’s strength stems from web of alliances with fellow militant groups in North Waziristan, the tribal district that since 2001 has evolved into a vibrant global hub of jihadi money, ideology and fighters.
Explosions and gunfire rang out across the airport in the early morning hours on Monday as the police and security forces battled with the attackers. Just before 5 a.m., after five hours of siege, the military reported that the last of the 10 attackers had been killed. One major ally is the Haqqani network, a formidable force in the Afghan insurgency that held the American soldier Bowe Bergdahl hostage for five years until his release on May 31. But Waziristan is also home to elements of the Afghan Taliban, and to an array of smaller jihadi clusters — Punjabis, Chechens, Arabs, Uzbeks, and a smattering of Westerners — who are focused on other theaters of conflict, but have at times helped the Pakistani Taliban in their fight against the country’s government and military.
The chief minister of Sindh Province, Syed Qaim Ali Shah, told reporters that in addition to the 10 attackers, 19 other people had died, including 11 members of the Airport Security Force, five local airline officials and three others. “They were well trained,” he said of the assailants. “Their plan was very well thought out.” Some of the most hard-bitten fighters come from Uzbekistan, men who followed Osama bin Laden into Pakistan after September 2001, and who have since become an important element of the Taliban insurgency, offering Pakistan fighters what experts call a deep bench of militant training and expertise.
Maj. Gen. Rizwan Akhtar, the director general of a paramilitary force that is deployed in Karachi, told reporters that the attackers appeared to be of Uzbek origin. General Akhtar said the attackers came in two groups of five each. Three attackers detonated their explosive vests, while seven were killed by security forces, he said. Uzbeks played a central role in two major jailbreaks and an attack on Peshawar’s airport over the past two years. And when Pakistani security forces displayed the bodies of the men who attacked Karachi airport on Sunday — a line of 10 shrouds, one of them topped with a severed head — they said that several of them were Uzbeks.
The assault was the most ambitious of its kind in Pakistan since Islamist militants attacked a navy air base in central Karachi in 2011. Although elite commandos moved quickly to counter the airport assault, many Pakistanis expressed shock that militants could penetrate such a prominent target so thoroughly and raised questions about why the attack had not been prevented by the military’s powerful spy service, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence. Speaking by telephone from Waziristan, a Pakistani Taliban commander said the foreign jihadis had participated in the operation in revenge for recent military airstrikes in Waziristan month that targeted the Uzbeks. “The I.M.U. has always been a great source of strength for us,” the commander said, referring to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the main Uzbek group. “They were very furious at the strikes, which killed a dozen of their people.”
The attack began late Sunday, when the gunmen made it past security checkpoints near the airport’s old terminal, which is mostly used for cargo or private flights for senior government officials and business leaders. Some news reports said the men wore identification saying they were members of the Airport Security Force. For Pakistan’s leaders, who for months have been wavering between talking and fighting, the Taliban’s robustness is likely to inform their next step. The prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, is due to meet with the army leadership in the next two days, Pakistani officials said, to discuss a possible military response to the Karachi attack.
Hurling grenades and unleashing automatic weapons fire, the attackers at least initially moved toward the nearby web of runways as they fought, according to news and witness reports. “This marks an escalation of the war,” said Adil Najam, a Pakistani analyst who is dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. “And it shows that this is going to be a long war.”
News images showed a major fire blazing in the airport complex that filled the night sky with an orange glow and appeared to be near parked jets. But a senior spokesman for the Pakistani military, Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, denied news reports that two planes had caught fire. He also denied reports that the gunmen had been trying to hijack an airliner. Fresh details of Sunday’s assault underlined how well prepared the Taliban were.
All flights to Karachi were diverted to other airports. Television pictures showed ambulances racing from the airport, which is named after Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, ferrying people to the hospital. The assault started at around 11 p.m. when two teams of five militants, disguised as police and army paramilitaries, entered the airport complex over a perimeter wall and through an entrance frequently used by top government officials and foreign dignitaries.
Although the fighting took place away from the main terminal used by commercial airlines, some passengers were stranded on airplanes that had been about to take off when the assault started. As counterterrorism commandos scrambled to respond, some arriving in armored personnel carriers, the fighting centered on the airport’s old terminal, known as the Hajj terminal, and a nearby cargo building. The militants fought through the night as terrified passengers sat in airplanes stranded on the tarmac. The cargo building became engulfed in flames.
At one point, Syed Saim A. Rizvi, a Twitter user who said he was on a flight, reported that commandos from the army’s elite Special Services Group had taken control of his plane. Moments later, he reported a “huge blast” and heavy firing outside and a “full panic” on board. When the battle finally ended an hour before dawn on Monday, officials said, the militants had killed at least 19 people, including four employees of Pakistan International Airlines, the state carrier.
Two hours later, he said that the Pakistani military had safely evacuated all passengers from the plane. A senior army officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the public, said that seven attackers were killed in the fighting, and another three died when they blew up their suicide vests.
A spokeswoman at Jinnah Hospital in Karachi, Dr. Seemi Jamali, said that in addition to the dead, at least 16 people had been seriously injured. By midafternoon the airport had been reopened for passenger traffic. But with many flights canceled or rescheduled, passengers gathered around airline information counters in an atmosphere that veered from apprehensive to resigned.
A senior officer with the Rangers, the paramilitary force that helps secure the airport, told reporters that the attackers had been carrying Indian weapons, in an apparent suggestion of Indian involvement that was greeted with widespread derision on social media. Elvina James, 46, who was hoping to fly to Lahore, was philosophical about using the airport so soon. “You have to take some risks in life,” she said.
A tentative peace process with the Taliban, begun by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government in February, has disintegrated in recent weeks. The militant group has split into at least two factions, in part over disagreements about whether to negotiate with the government. The Pakistani Army renewed a campaign of airstrikes against the militants in North Waziristan two weeks ago, and factions of the Taliban were believed to be behind a deadly attack on a high-security military complex near Rawalpindi last week. Ahsan Hameed, a trader on his way to Dubai, said he was putting his faith in the Pakistani Army.
Karachi, a city that was long a haven for militant fighters, financiers and sleeper cells, has in recent years become increasingly contested by the Taliban and other militants. Many have moved in from the country’s northwestern tribal regions and have become embroiled in the violent political turf battles that have racked the city. Dr. Sofia Yousuf, on her way to Saudi Arabia with her family for a religious pilgrimage, was still upset by the night’s events. “In Pakistan you get used to these things happening,” she said. “But I’m so sad about what will happen next.”
The situation is further complicated by political uncertainty. Last week, Karachi was shut down for three days after the British police arrested Altaf Hussain, the leader of the city’s biggest political party, who lives in London, on suspicion of money laundering. Mr. Hussain was released on Saturday but remains under investigation. Karachi is already a city in political tumult. But the Taliban attack represented a rare assault on the privileges of the most affluent citizens of the country’s most cosmopolitan city.
In a further demonstration of the brittle security situation across Pakistan, at least 23 Shiites were reported killed on Sunday in a coordinated suicide bombing in a remote part of Baluchistan Province, on the border with Iran. The Associated Press quoted provincial officials as saying that the Shiites were attacked while returning from a pilgrimage to Iran. Although some wealthy businessmen from Karachi have been kidnapped by the Taliban, most of the rich have insulated themselves from Taliban violence, which has most often targeted military bases, the police or markets where poor Pakistanis gather. But Sunday’s attack closed, temporarily, a transport hub that for many is a gateway to meetings in Dubai, holidays in Thailand and summer homes in London.
Although the Taliban have frequently been behind attacks on Shiites and other religious and ethnic minorities in Pakistan, such violence in Baluchistan has more often been waged by other sectarian militias like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Human rights officials have accused Pakistan’s military of aiding or turning a blind eye toward those groups, as they are considered its allies in a long war against Baluch separatists. Some Karachi residents said they feared that Western airlines might reduce their services, as some did after the Red Mosque siege in Islamabad in 2007. Others vented their frustrations on social media, remarking acerbically how airport security officials, who are famous for their great care in searching passengers for illegal alcohol, failed to halt the terrorists.
At least 10 members of the security forces were killed in the 2011 attack on the Mehran naval base, which also destroyed two surveillance planes provided to Pakistan by the United States and deeply embarrassed the country’s military. The Taliban’s boldness in Karachi may help provoke action in Waziristan. In recent weeks, tribal elders from North Waziristan have held meetings with senior government officials in Peshawar — an indication, some say, that they are girding for an impending army operation.
In December 2012, Taliban militants struck the airport in Peshawar, the main city in Pakistan’s northwest, killing seven people. That attack was suspected of being aimed at a military facility inside the airport’s boundaries. “The T.T.P. has closed the avenue for talks,” said Mr. Shaikh, the retired diplomat, using the abbreviation for the main Pakistani Taliban faction. “And the army knows that if it can get to the root, the branches will wither.”
But any action against the Taliban, as ever, is fraught with spy skullduggery and politics. There is little indication that, for all its tough talk against the Taliban, Pakistan’s military has abandoned its decades-old policy of indulging some militant groups, like the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba, who have been willing to further the army’s foreign policy aims.
The military also is caught up in simmering tensions with Mr. Sharif, the prime minister, who has clung to the idea that peace talks can still end the Pakistani Taliban’s insurgency.
“Now that the Taliban have splintered, we could see multiple groups fighting the government in different ways,” said Mr. Najam, the academic. “And so the real test is whether the political will can hold.”