Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.
 Members of the Pakistani army |
The shift of Pakistani forces from fighting jihadists in the northwest territories to the Indian border may leave Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad exposed to possible terrorist attack, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.
Islamabad is within a hundred miles of the 3,500-square-mile Swat Valley in the administrative district of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, and insurgents now control most of this mountainous region.
Last September, jihadists showed their ability to wreak havoc in the highly protected capital by detonating two bombs at the Islamabad Marriott Hotel.
The detonations were thought to have been done with a technically advanced thermobaric bomb which accelerates and then expands the impact. The bomb killed more than 50 people, including U.S. government employees.
Pakistani authorities believe the terrorist group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, conducted the terrorist attack on the Marriott.
Baitullah Mehsud heads the TTP in South Waziristan in the northwestern part of Pakistan’s tribal belt.
The attack was thought to be in retaliation for operations then under way by Pakistani security forces against TTP’s comrades in the Swat Valley, the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, or TNSM.
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Swat Valley is considered to be is one of the most strategic areas in Pakistan. It provides for territorial continuity between the tribal region of Waziristan in the southwest and Kashmir in the northeast.
It is on the eastern side of the strategic Khyber Pass, the mountain crossing between China and Afghanistan through which vital supplies flow to U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan.
The supplies recently were cut off, prompting U.S. officials to look to alternative means to supply U.S. troops, which are to be increased by some 30,000 in the near future.
The Khyber Pass is one of two important routes from the Pakistani port of Karachi used to deliver supplies.
But now Pakistani forces have shifted to the Indian border out of concern that India may undertake a military response to November’s terrorist attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai, formerly called Bombay.
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