The ever-present threat to Washington D.C. by terrorists has now gotten a bit more present: Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistan Taliban leader who American officials fear could be an even bigger threat to the United States than Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden says there will be a spectacular attack on the nation’s capital “soon.”
The top Taliban commander in Pakistan promised an assault on Washington “soon” – one he says will “amaze” the world.
“Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world,” Baitullah Mehsud told The Associated Press by phone.
Mehsud also claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack on a police academy outside the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, saying it was in retaliation for U.S. missile strikes against militants along the Afghan border.
Mehsud and other Pakistani Taliban militants are believed to be based in the country’s lawless areas near the border with Afghanistan, where they have stepped up their attacks throughout Pakistan.
One year ago, CBS News security correspondent Bob Orr reported that U.S. intelligence officials were increasingly concerned that Mehsud could eclipse even Osama bin Laden as a threat to America.
Mehsud is highly sought-after — by U.S. officials who recently announced that there’s a $5 million reward on him.
Asked about it, he told the AP he would be happy to “embrace martyrdom.”
Mehsud has made voluminous threats against the West for years, as he rose to his current stature as the head of the Taliban in Pakistan, and he gave no apparent specifics in his threat on the U.S. capital on Tuesday, notes CBS News’ Sami Yousafzai in Peshawar.
Mehsud seems to be where Osama bin Laden was before 911: he is perceived as an extremely serious threat to the United States and his name is out there — but he remains out there.
And this isn’t a notoriety that just occurred just this week. Just read this entry from Time magazine in 2008 written by Peter Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know:
For Pakistanis, the Dec. 27 assassination of Benazir Bhutto was the J.F.K. murder and 9/11 rolled into one, plunging the nation into days of mourning and setting off riots across the country. It was a stunning victory for Pakistan’s militants, who have increasingly turned their firepower against the state, conducting more than 50 suicide attacks in 2007 alone.
The government quickly fingered Baitullah Mehsud as the mastermind of the Bhutto assassination; he had previously threatened to kill her. The details of Mehsud’s biography are sketchy, as he shuns publicity. He is known to be in his mid-30s and to lead thousands of militants, many of them Mehsud tribesmen, in Waziristan, a tribal region on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
In his first television interview, conducted by al-Jazeera last year, Mehsud said his ultimate aim is to attack New York City and London. This was more than mere rhetoric. In January, Spanish police said a cell of Pakistanis they arrested in Barcelona were planning suicide operations in Spain and possibly elsewhere in Europe. They had allegedly been dispatched by Mehsud. And so we can add another name to the list of Islamist terrorists with global reach.
Now add “Washington” to that list of names named by someone who walks the (terrorist) walk..
UPDATE: More blog reaction is HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.