“What we’re facing here is not an episodic series of terrorist events. What we’re facing is a group of people who see themselves as revolutionaries,” Phillip Mudd said.

Until he retired a few months ago, Mudd was the senior intelligence advisor to the FBI and its director. He is an authority on homegrown terrorism and believes the recent activity has been poorly organized and executed by lone wolfs or clusters of individuals who aren’t part of an organized network or a terrorist cell. Instead, they see themselves as part of global movement that is being facilitated by the Internet.

“The Internet often is not the initial spark, but it helps them go down a path,” he explained.

Asked what they are seeing on the web, Mudd said, “They’re seeing images, for example, of children and women in places like Palestine and Iraq, they’re seeing sermons of people who explain in simple, compelling, and some cases magnetic terms why it’s important that they join the jihad. They’re seeing images, and messages that confirm a path that they’re already thinking of taking.”

And according to Mudd, they are seeing all of this in English.

Read or better yet watch it all via video.

He was an American citizen with a three-bedroom suburban home, a wife and two kids. He shopped at Macy’s and ate Oreos. His picture was on Facebook. He had an MBA and a job as a financial analyst. His wife liked to watch “Friends.” And then, authorities contend, Faisal Shahzad tried to set off a bomb in Times Square.

A decade after 9/11, it increasingly seems to have come to this: We have met the enemy — and he is carrying an American passport.

For generations, assimilation has been the story told by the United States — the recipe for making Americans. Irish and Italians, Catholics and blacks, Japanese and Jews joined the mainstream even as they maintained their unique cultures and traditions.

But today, with the world a mouse click away and most every country in the world accessible in little more than a day, globalization is competing fiercely with assimilation. People who have a foot in two strikingly different cultures no longer leave one behind for the other. Now they can move between them easily, fluidly, quickly.

Read it all.

Saying they obtained new evidence, senior White House officials said Sunday that the Pakistani Taliban were behind the failed Times Square bombing.

The attempt marks the first time the group has been able to launch an attack on U.S. soil. And while U.S. officials have downplayed the threat ”” citing the bomb’s lack of sophistication ”” the incident in Times Square and Christmas Day airline bomber indicate growing strength by overseas terrorist groups linked to al-Qaida even as the CIA says their operations are seriously degraded.

The finding also raises new questions about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan, which is widely known to have al-Qaida and other terrorist groups operating within its borders.

Read the whole article.

Police combed through a charred SUV and a crude assortment of explosives Sunday for clues to a failed Times Square bombing as a monitoring group reported that the Pakistani Taliban had claimed responsibility for the terrorist threat.

An intelligence monitoring group released a one-minute video allegedly from the Pakistani Taliban, in which it claimed responsibility for the failed bombing in a smoking SUV left parked in the city on Saturday night, clearing thousands of tourists and theatergoers from the city’s busiest district.

The U.S.-based SITE intelligence group, which monitors militant websites, said the Pakistani Taliban claims the attack is revenge for the death of its leader Baitullah Mehsud and the recent killings of the top leaders of al-Qaida in Iraq. Images of the slain militants are shown as an unidentified voice recites the message. English subtitles are at the bottom of the screen.

Read it all.

Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud survived an American drone attack in the north-west of the country in January, intelligence sources say.

Officials said at the time that he was killed in a US missile attack along with at least 10 suspected militants.

Pakistani intelligence officials now say that Mr Mehsud was only wounded in the attack – although his authority within the Taliban has diminished.

From the outset, the Taliban consistently denied that he was dead.

Read it all.

For those who think Pakistan is all hard-liners, all the time, three activities at an annual festival here may come as a surprise.

Thousands of Muslim worshipers paid tribute to the patron saint of this eastern Pakistani city this month by dancing, drumming and smoking pot.

It is not an image one ordinarily associates with Pakistan, a country whose tormented western border region dominates the news. But it is an important part of how Islam is practiced here, a tradition that goes back a thousand years to Islam’s roots in South Asia.

Read it all.

The Taliban’s top military commander has been arrested in a joint CIA-Pakistani operation in Pakistan in a major victory against the insurgents as U.S. troops push into their heartland in southern Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday.

Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the group’s No. 2 leader behind Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar and a close associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, two Pakistani intelligence officers and a senior U.S. official said.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release such sensitive information.

One Pakistani officer said Baradar was arrested 10 days ago with the assistance of the United States and “was talking” to his interrogators.

Read it all.

Victory or defeat in Afghanistan will be determined by how the United States engages Pakistan this year.

In particular, the US counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan hinges on whether or not the “Afghan Taliban,” a Pashtun movement, maintains sanctuary and support from outside the country.

Currently, the Pakistani government is not denying that sanctuary to the Afghan Taliban, or the “Pakistan Taliban” (also Pashtun). I spent 10 days last month in Islamabad and Peshawar speaking with leaders from across society, including those with direct access to the Taliban.

Conversations revealed that there are three things that the US must understand in order to end the Taliban insurgencies on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border: respect, reconciliation, and religious freedom.

Read it all.

The discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.

Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.

US airstrikes in Pakistan, launched from unmanned drones, are now averaging three a week, triple the number last year. “We’re quietly seeing a geographical shift,” an intelligence officer said.

Read it all.

Three US Marines are among at least 10 people killed in an attack on a convoy near a school in north-west Pakistan.

Police said around 70 people, including 63 school girls and another US soldier, were injured in the roadside bombing in Lower Dir, near the Afghan border.

The soldiers were believed to have been training Pakistan’s Frontier Corps in counter-insurgency against the Taliban.

The attack comes amid a major government offensive against Taliban militants in the area.

Read it all.

Hard but important to look at.

Fierce fighting has broken out as the Pakistan army battles Taliban militants in their remote strongholds in the South Waziristan province.

Local officials said 30,000 troops, backed by artillery, had moved into the region where Pakistan Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud is based.

Officials said the Taliban were resisting as troops mobilised from the north, east, and west.

A curfew was imposed in the region before the offensive began.

Read it all.

The latest violence in Pakistan, including a successful Taliban attack on its Pentagon, may be an indication that the country is coming apart, or at least on the verge of sharp change.

The degree to which the calamitous situation is a result of U.S. policy toward it or U.S. actions nearby is open to question. What is clear is that whatever U.S. policy toward Pakistan is at the moment, it is not working to achieve U.S. interests there.

Read it all.

Steps by the United States to vastly expand its aid to Pakistan, as well as the footprint of its embassy and private security contractors here, are aggravating an already volatile anti-American mood as Washington pushes for greater action by the government against the Taliban.

An aid package of $1.5 billion a year for the next five years passed by Congress last week asks Pakistan to cease supporting terrorist groups on its soil and to ensure that the military does not interfere with civilian politics. President Asif Ali Zardari, whose association with the United States has added to his unpopularity, agreed to the stipulations in the aid package.

But many here, especially in the powerful army, object to the conditions as interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs, and they are interpreting the larger American footprint in more sinister ways.

Read it all.

As American troops move deeper into southern Afghanistan to fight Taliban insurgents, U.S. officials are expressing new concerns about the role of fugitive Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and his council of lieutenants, who reportedly plan and launch cross-border strikes from safe havens around the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta.

But U.S. officials acknowledge they know relatively little about the remote and arid Pakistani border region, have no capacity to strike there, and have few windows into the turbulent mix of Pashtun tribal and religious politics that has turned the area into a sanctuary for the Taliban leaders, who are known collectively as the Quetta Shura.

Pakistani officials, in turn, have been accused of allowing the Taliban movement to regroup in the Quetta area, viewing it as a strategic asset rather than a domestic threat, while the army has been heavily focused on curbing violent Islamist extremists in the northwest border region hundreds of miles away.

Read it all.

The United States is threatening to launch airstrikes on Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership in the Pakistani city of Quetta as frustration mounts about the ease with which they find sanctuary across the border from Afghanistan.

The threat comes amid growing divisions in Washington about whether to deal with the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan by sending more troops or by reducing them and targeting the terrorists.

This weekend the US military was expected to send a request to Robert Gates, the defence secretary, for more troops, as urged by General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander there.

Read it all.

President Asif Ali Zardari has promised the Archbishop of Canterbury and the former Bishop of Rochester that his government will crack down on those who abuse Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to persecute Christians.

Meeting on Sept 18 at the Churchill Hyatt Regency Hotel in London, President Zardari said his government was aware of the misuse of the blasphemy laws to persecute Christians, and promised Dr Rowan Williams and Dr Michael Nazir-Ali that those responsible for the Gojra massacre would be brought to justice.

Read it all.

A Muslim mob torched a church and the homes of a number of Christians in the Punjab last week, following claims that local Christians had committed blasphemy by desecrating the Koran.

The Sept 11 attack in the village of Sambrial, approximately 20 miles west of the city of Sialkot near Pakistan’s border with Kashmir, marks the fourth time in two months that Muslim mobs have attacked Christian neighbourhoods over alleged insults to the Koran, reports Aftab Mughal of Minorities Concern of Pakistan.

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani have condemned the attack and have asked Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif to investigate the incident. Press reports from Pakistan report that President Zardari has called for calm, and promised the government would rebuild the church.

Reed it all.

The online petition to change the blasphemy legislation in Pakistan, of which NIFCON (the Anglican Communion Network for Inter Faith Concerns) was one of the sponsors, was presented to the Pakistan High Commissioner in London on Tuesday 8 September. The petition followed a recent statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury, condemning attacks on Christians in Pakistan.

Read it all.

US-based International Christian Concern (ICC) is reporting that an 18-year-old Christian has been accused of blasphemy, beaten, and imprisoned in Gujranwala, Pakistan. ICC says the man has been falsely accused.

The young man, Safian Masih, lived in a mixed neighbourhood of both Christians and Muslims. On August 8, the young daughter of one of his Muslim neighbours demanded that Safian bring her items from the grocery store. Safian refused, and she slapped him. Safian slapped her back, and the argument escalated to include both families.

Read it all.

Ethel Khurshid Gil gingerly held out the charred Bible she pulled from the rubble of her home, using a swatch of cellophane to keep the scorched pages from scattering in the hot wind. “Look how they’ve destroyed our Bibles!” the 47-year-old Christian Pakistani cried out.

Not far away, charred wood and broken dishes crunched underfoot as Umair Akhlas stepped through his house to point out the blackened bedroom where he and his relatives hid from the mob that firebombed the building, shouting “Burn them alive!”

Akhlas and several relatives escaped. But six, including two children, couldn’t breach the flames and died in that room.

“They were screaming Christians are dogs, that we’re American agents,” Akhlas said. “They look for any reason to do something against Christians.”

Pakistan has had its hands full waging war against a Taliban insurgency. Now another troubling crisis simmers. Last week, riots broke out in Gojra, a city of 150,000 in the eastern province of Punjab, after accusations surfaced that Christians at a wedding ceremony had desecrated a copy of the holy Koran.

Read it all.

These incidents are the latest in the ongoing series of attacks that Christians in Pakistan have had to endure in recent years.

The Revd Patrick Augustine, now a priest of The Episcopal Church in Wisconsin, United States, but himself born in Gojra, where his father and grandfather ministered, writes that in such attacks, ”˜The Muslim attackers have often justified the persecution of Christians in Pakistan on the basis of the draconian Blasphemy Law section 295”“B and 295-C passed in 1982. These two laws make anyone deemed to have insulted the holy prophet of Islam or dishonoured the Holy Qur’an liable for capital punishment and life imprisonment and fines. In its selective application it has provided a pretext for private vendettas, but its victims almost always have been Christians.’

Bishop Mano Rumalshah of Peshawar Diocese in Pakistan commented, ”˜It is horrible to have to say this – but at least these latest incidents have led to somebody ”“ both in Pakistan and outside the country – hearing our cry. Such episodes occur again and again, and their nature is always very similar: false accusations being made against Christians, and Muslim militants being stirred up by the voices of extremist preachers.’

Read it all.

The recent atrocities against Christians in Pakistan will sear the imaginations of countless people of all faiths throughout the world. As the minister of law in the Punjab has already said, such actions are not the work of true Muslims: they are an abuse of real faith and an injury to its reputation as well as an outrage against common humanity, and deserve forthright condemnation.

Read it all.

The modest office where Sarfraz Naeemi kept his library and received visitors seeking spiritual guidance is now a charred hole. The floor is strewn with burned pages, glass shards and ball bearings from a young suicide bomber’s lethal vest.

Even though this cultured provincial capital is fast becoming used to bombings, the assassination of Naeemi, a scholarly cleric who promoted religious harmony and spoke out against Taliban extremism, has resonated far beyond the blackened walls and shattered windows of the quiet seminary he headed here.

Read it all.

A suicide bombing Tuesday at Peshawar’s only five-star hotel is the latest of several recent attacks in this northwestern Pakistani city.

It comes after the Taliban threatened to launch periodic attacks in retaliation for an ongoing Army offensive against militants in the Swat Valley. As the town closest to the battle zone and to Pakistan’s tribal areas, a militant stronghold, Peshawar makes for a prime target.

Although the Taliban are unlikely to take over the city, say analysts, the attacks have stirred up fear among residents and disrupted routine life. Schools have closed by order of the government, and business has slowed. Normally bustling markets have emptied. Some families have left town.

Read it all.

A senior Pakistani Taliban leader has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s deadly suicide attack in the eastern city of Lahore.

Taliban official Hakimullah Mehsud told news agencies Thursday that the attack on police and intelligence offices was revenge for the ongoing military offensive in northwestern Pakistan’s Swat Valley.

Read it all.

The Pakistani army has retaken control of key parts of the contested Swat Valley in recent days, but the Taliban has kept its grip on some of the area’s largest towns nearly a month into a massive military offensive, army commanders said Friday during a visit near the front lines.

Speaking at a rudimentary base in the heart of this verdant valley, the commanders acknowledged that regaining full control of Swat will probably take months and involve intense combat with the well-trained, well-funded Taliban militia. Highlighting the difficulty, some extremists are simply melting back into the civilian population so they can fight another day, as they have during previous clashes over the past 18 months in Swat.

“You cannot distinguish between a Talib and a normal citizen,” said Maj. Gen. Sajjad Ali, who commands troops in the northern portion of Swat. “The area is densely populated, and it’s very easy for the terrorists to hide.”

Read it all.

Members of Congress have been told in confidential briefings that Pakistan is rapidly adding to its nuclear arsenal even while racked by insurgency, raising questions on Capitol Hill about whether billions of dollars in proposed military aid might be diverted to Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed the assessment of the expanded arsenal in a one-word answer to a question on Thursday in the midst of lengthy Senate testimony. Sitting beside Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, he was asked whether he had seen evidence of an increase in the size of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

“Yes,” he said quickly, adding nothing, clearly cognizant of Pakistan’s sensitivity to any discussion about the country’s nuclear strategy or security.

Read it all.

The Bishop of Rochester has called on the Government to ensure that British policy is effective at tackling the syllabus in Pakistan’s madrassas. ‘

Bishop Michael Nazi-Ali said in the House of Lords that the education in the country’s madrassas were “fuelling international education”.

He called for an assurance that “British aid policy for education will be effective this time in changing the syllabus in the madrassas”.

Read it all.

As Taliban militants push deeper into Pakistan’s settled areas, foreign operatives of Al Qaeda who had focused on plotting attacks against the West are seizing on the turmoil to sow chaos in Pakistan and strengthen the hand of the militant Islamist groups there, according to American and Pakistani intelligence officials.

One indication came April 19, when a truck parked inside a Qaeda compound in South Waziristan, in Pakistan’s tribal areas, erupted in a fireball when it was struck by a C.I.A. missile. American intelligence officials say that the truck had been loaded with high explosives, apparently to be used as a bomb, and that while its ultimate target remains unclear, the bomb would have been more devastating than the suicide bombing that killed more than 50 people at the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in September.

Al Qaeda’s leaders ”” a predominantly Arab group of Egyptians, Saudis and Yemenis, as well as other nationalities like Uzbeks ”” for years have nurtured ties to Pakistani militant groups like the Taliban operating in the mountains of Pakistan. The foreign operatives have historically set their sights on targets loftier than those selected by the local militant groups, aiming for spectacular attacks against the West, but they may see new opportunity in the recent violence.

Read it all