Pakistani Taliban Behind Times Sq. Plot

“We’ve now developed evidence that shows the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack,” Attorney GeneralEric Holder said in an interview on ABC television’s news program “This Week.”

Later, appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” he said theTaliban in Pakistan “directed this plot” and may have also financed it. The Pakistani Taliban, he said, was “intimately involved” in the attempt on May 1 by Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen of Pakistani descent, to blow up gasoline and propane tanks secreted inside a Nissan Pathfinder parked on West 45th Street just yards from the heart of Times Square.

Full article HERE

تحريک طالبان پاکستان; Tehrik-i-Taliban

So, the Tehrik is flexing its muscle by sending this guy to bomb Times Square huh? Well, they seem to be the junior league and not so much the Al-Qaeda second string here. Of course I think there is more to this story that will be coming out here. I personally think that this group just saw an opportunity and took it with our boy Shahzad. They saw a weak minded and mal adjusted person and used him to their ends.

In any case, the sites out there on the internet do talk about these guys a bit, especially with the drone strike that took out Meshud a while back. However, I cannot seem to find a single site that was solely just a Tehrik site whatsoever. So, I really don’t see this group as super scary, but, they have set a precedent for the US to learn from on a few levels.

These precedents are:

1) Its still pretty easy to drive a truck bomb around the US and just park it and leave. We were lucky that this bomb was poorly put together and that someone nearby was alert enough to get a cop

2) Its easy to send this country into a frenzy over incidents like this. Now people are wary, or maybe should we call it more “vigilant”  So much so that within one week we had two more incidents with parcels and a car that triggered events. Its a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. Net/net, we are twitchy again and that’s just how the terrorists want us to be.

3) The NO FLY list is dysfunctional and needs a re-think. No, Faisal did not make it onto the plane, however, he almost did because the no fly list was not sync’d up at the time he was boarding. So, his name had not appeared on the list and he would have been let on the plane had the Feds not called it in and had him stopped at the gate from what I am hearing.

4) The news media is just WAY out of hand with all these “anonymous” sources for reporting the stories. This has been fueling the whole FUD factor all too much since the bomb fail last week.

5) The Talib’s and the Pakistani problem is coming home to roost. All of the drone attacks while using a velvet glove with the government there have set the stage for multiple problems with a nuclear state that has embedded terrorists within. Its frankly a nightmare and we need to get a handle on this. We also need to get a handle on the tribal areas and get rid of the easy access to the country it provides to the jihadists.

I am sure there are more points that I could rattle off, but I am tired and it would likely devolve into aimless ranting. I just think that this country needs to sit down and ponder what happened, where we are, and just what could have happened had this guy been trained and had the motive to really do damage.

Imagine if instead they had gotten some of the Iraqi IED builders to make the bomb… It would have been a nightmare.

So, simply I say this.. Don’t buy all the we did a great job at-a-boys. We failed on many levels here and we need to address the problems. If we don’t then the next guy with more training and malice will wreak much more death and destruction and perhaps actually make it on that Emirates plane and out of the country.

CoB