Taliban On A Tear

Its Pakistan-based militants have launched two attacks on Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport since Sunday night:

On Tuesday, a number of gunmen on motorbikes opened fire on a training academy run by the Airports Security Force and located about a half mile from the airport. “We accept responsibility for another successful attack against the government,” Taliban spokesperson Shahidullah Shahid told Reuters, adding, “We are successfully achieving all our targets and we will go on carrying on many more such attacks.” …

The death toll from Sunday’s attack, meanwhile, has jumped. The BBC has updated its count to 38 dead, Reuters to 34, and the Associated Press to 36.

Saba Imtiaz highlights the security deficit that allows the Taliban to attack such high-value targets:

The attacks in Karachi underscore not just the intensity of the militants’ renewed campaign, but also Pakistan’s inability to effectively counter such threats in advance. Analysts and security experts have long bemoaned Pakistan’s inability to get its intelligence and security services to share intelligence.

Pakistan has a number of intelligence agencies, including the Inter-Services Intelligence agency and Military Intelligence, the civilian-run Intelligence Bureau, and the police’s Special Branch. A counter-terrorism strategy developed by the interior ministry this year envisages better coordination between intelligence and security agencies, but has yet to spur much change.

On Tuesday, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told parliament that his ministry had warned the provincial government in March that the gate used by militants to attack the airport was not properly secured. Similar claims have surfaced after previous militants attacks in Pakistan.

Ishaan Tharoor analyzes the strength of the Pakistani Taliban:

What began as a low-level militancy in Pakistan’s tribal belt along the porous border with Afghanistan has now metastasized into a sprawling insurgency that has tapped into nationwide networks of criminal syndicates and other terrorist organizations. The Pakistani Taliban’s profile in Karachi has grown in recent years, highlighted by a spate of brazen attacks, including the 17-hour siege of a Pakistani naval base near the airport in 2011.

Despite its effectiveness, the Pakistani Taliban operates in a fashion that is “not as hierarchical as one terrorist group may be,” says Hassan Abbas, author of the new book “The Taliban Revival: Violence and Extremism on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier.” Pakistan’s government, Abbas says, has struggled to adjust to the threat posed by the militants, who have claimed thousands of lives. “The Pakistani Taliban are as dangerous as al-Qaeda once was,” he says. “People think they’re just Pashtun tribals. But it has become a much more complicated crisis.”