Bomb for lunch

Terrorists wanted to blow up the entire leadership of Pakistan

A truck with explosives exploded outside the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on September 20 at the hour when the President and Prime Minister of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari and Yusuf Reza Gilani were about to meet with the command of the country's armed forces over a joint lunch. Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik announced this yesterday. According to him, the organizer of the dinner was the speaker of the national assembly, but “at the last moment the president and the prime minister changed the meeting place to the prime minister’s house, and all the leaders were saved.”

Such shocking details of the terrorist plot in Islamabad, aimed at the immediate elimination of literally the entire leadership of Pakistan, a country that is part of the world nuclear club, cannot but frighten. If the plans of the organizers had been completely successful, the world would have been faced with a situation where control over the “nuclear button” in such a country would have been lost with all the ensuing consequences. It is possible that in the event of such a force majeure development, the United States, as Washington has made clear more than once, has developed a scenario for a military operation to take control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenals.

So far, things have not come to this, but in any case, the terrorist attack in Islamabad will add headaches to Washington, which back in July of this year began an operation to destroy the traditional interaction of the Pakistani military department with the interdepartmental intelligence service IAS. The latter is suspected of having links with the Taliban and the Islamist network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani. At the end of July 2008, according to the website “Afghanistan.ru”, Deputy Director of the CIA Stefan Kappes and Chief of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen visited Pakistan. Returning to the United States, they sharply publicly criticized the activities of I.S.I. It is Haqqani who, according to the CIA, is associated with al-Qaeda. Namely, al-Qaeda and the Taliban, although no one has yet claimed responsibility for the explosion at the Marriott, are the main suspects in its organization.

Most likely, the US military will now continue with even greater intensity the operation it began in August to destroy Taliban bases in Waziristan, a strip of Pashtun tribes lying on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. An expert at the Russian Center for the Study of Contemporary Afghanistan, Andrei Serenko, in an interview with Vremya Novostey, suggested that the intensity of these attacks will increase in October, on the eve of the US presidential elections on November 4. Washington will continue the hunt for Haqqani, and at the same time for its main target - Ayman al-Jawahiri, the second person in Al-Qaeda after Bin Laden. Our interlocutor counted at least six American missile attacks carried out on bases in Waziristan from drone aircraft based in Afghanistan. One of these attacks turned out to be especially painful for the militants - the head of Pakistani al-Qaeda, Abu Harris, was killed, and the expert does not rule out that the attack on the Marriott in Islamabad was the Islamists' revenge for the death of their leader.

Meanwhile, American plans to suppress the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan are facing resistance from the Pakistani military, which considers US activity a violation of their country's sovereignty. Just yesterday, according to sources in the Pakistani intelligence services, two American helicopters that invaded Pakistani airspace were fired upon by the Pakistani military. This is the second such incident in the last few days. Not a single helicopter was shot down, and all returned safely to territory in Afghanistan. The VN expert considers this symptomatic: “You can shoot in different ways. The Pakistanis, on the one hand, while maintaining their dignity, make it clear that they will cope with their problems themselves, and on the other hand, they do not want to aggravate matters with the Americans.”

Andrei Serenko believes that now events can develop in two directions - either the US efforts to eliminate interdepartmental intelligence will continue, or the Pakistani military itself will undertake another coup and take power into their own hands, thus offering their own way of fighting terrorism in their country . The expert believes that both of these prospects are more than real and the question is which of them will have an impact first. Comparing the role of the military in Turkey and Pakistan, VN’s interlocutor argues that if in the first case the army is the guarantor of stability, then in the second it is the intelligence services.

Meanwhile, unknown militants continue to escalate the situation in Pakistan. Yesterday in Peshawar, Abdul Khaleq Farahi, the Consul General of Afghanistan to Pakistan, was kidnapped on the street in broad daylight. The driver of his car and bodyguard were killed, and the diplomat was taken away in an unknown direction. This incident led to a new round of aggravation in Afghan-Pakistani relations, which had just begun to improve after the resignation of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf a month ago. Now some observers are already wondering when he will return to power again...

Arkady DUBNOV