Pakistan has been looming in the background since BEFORE 9/11.
Why their role has not been further investigated...may have something to do with the pre-9/11 wining and dining of Pakistani ISI.
Pakistan Link Seen in Afghan Suicide Attacks
A suicide bomber hit a NATO convoy in October in southern Afghanistan. Recent attacks aimed at civilians.
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov. 13 — Afghan and NATO security forces have recently rounded up several men like Hafiz Daoud Shah, a 21-year-old unemployed Afghan refugee who says he drove across the border to Afghanistan in September in a taxi with three other would-be suicide bombers.
Ahmed Shah, right, father of an Afghan who returned to Kabul as a suicide bomber, at his home in Karachi, Pakistan, with another son, Nadir.
Every case, Afghan security officials say, is similar to that of Mr. Shah, who repeated his story in a rare jailhouse interview with a reporter in Kabul, the Afghan capital. The trail of organizing, financing and recruiting the bombers who have carried out a rising number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan traces back to Pakistan, they say.
“Every single bomber or I.E.D. in one way or another is linked to Pakistan,” a senior Afghan intelligence official said, referring to improvised explosive devices like roadside bombs. “Their reasons are to keep Afghanistan destabilized, to make us fail, and to keep us fragmented.” He would speak on the subject only if not identified.
A senior United States military official based in Afghanistan agreed for the most part. “The strong belief is that recruiting, training and provision of technical equipment for I.E.D.’s in the main takes place outside Afghanistan,” he said. By I.E.D.’s he meant suicide bombers as well. He, too, did not want his name used because he knew his remarks were likely to offend Pakistani leaders.
The charge is in fact one of the most contentious that Afghan and American officials have leveled at the Pakistani leadership, which frequently denies the infiltration problem and insists that the roots of the Taliban insurgency lie in Afghanistan.
The dispute continues to divide Afghan and Pakistani leaders, even as the Bush administration tries to push them toward greater cooperation in fighting the Taliban, whose ranks have swelled to as many as 10,000 fighters this year.
A year ago, roadside bombs and suicide attacks were rare occurrences in Afghanistan. But they have grown more frequent and more deadly. There have been more than 90 suicide attacks in Afghanistan this year. In September and October, nearly 100 people were killed in such attacks.
Afghan security forces say that in the same period, they captured 17 suspected bombers, two of them would-be suicide bombers; NATO forces say they caught 10 people planning suicide bomb attacks in recent weeks.
Last week, for the first time, a Pakistani intelligence official acknowledged that suicide bombers were being trained in Bajaur, a small Pathan tribal area along the border. In a briefing given only on condition of anonymity, the official cited the training as one reason for an airstrike this month on a religious school there that killed more than 80 people.
The arrests of Mr. Shah and others like him, Afghan and NATO officials say, show that groups intent on carrying out attacks in Afghanistan continue to operate easily inside Pakistan.
Mr. Shah said he was one of four would-be suicide bombers who arrived in Kabul from Pakistan on Sept. 30. One of them killed 12 people and wounded 40 at the pedestrian entrance to the Interior Ministry the same day.
The attack was the first suicide bomb aimed not at foreign troops but at Afghans, and it terrified Kabul residents. The dead included a woman and her child.
By Mr. Shah’s account, it could have been far worse. Mr. Shah said he and his cohort had planned to blow themselves up in four separate attacks in the capital. That they failed was due partly to luck and partly to vigilance by Afghan and NATO security forces. But their plot represented a clear escalation in the bombers’ ambitions in Afghanistan.
Wearing a black prayer cap and long beard, Mr. Shah recounted his own involvement in the presence of two Afghan intelligence officers at a jail run by the National Directorate of Security. The Afghan intelligence officers offered up Mr. Shah because, unlike others in custody facing similar charges, his investigation was over. He is now awaiting trial.
Mr. Shah showed no signs of fear or discomfort in front of his guards. But after two weeks in detention, he complained of tiredness and headaches from a longstanding but unspecified mental ailment, something his father confirmed in a separate interview at the family home in Karachi, the southern Pakistani port city.
At first Mr. Shah, who was educated through the sixth grade, denied that he intended to be a suicide bomber, but said he had gone to Afghanistan only to fight a jihad, or holy war. “I was just thinking of fighting a jihad against the infidels,” he said. “I was hearing there was fighting in Afghanistan and seeing it in the newspapers.”
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