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‘Mehsud has pals in high places’

LAHORE: Baitullah Mehsud, the brazen Taliban chief based in Waziristan, has been able to escape several attempts to kill and capture him because he has friends in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, according to a Newsweek report. An “increasingly-emboldened” Mehsud has claimed credit for several attacks in Pakistan and also threatening to attack the US. "Soon we will launch an attack in Washington that will amaze everyone in the world," he told the Associated Press last week. An unnamed Pakistani official told Newsweek that senior US officials had even shared with their counterparts in Islamabad “some intelligence indicating that renegade ISI elements helped Mehsud's group train for the December 2007 assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister Benazir Bhutto”. But despite that and Pakistan's purported knowledge of his whereabouts, “it's a puzzle why they're ignoring and avoiding any strike against him,” one tribal elder in the region told the magazine. “On several occasions over the past couple of years, security forces in Pakistan have launched operations to kill or capture him, and each time he has vanished without incident,” the magazine writes citing unnamed officials in Islamabad and Washington. “Mehsud's contacts, the theory goes, are tipping him off before Pakistani troops can pounce.” "Baitullah is very much mixed up in Afghanistan and with Al Qaeda," said one Afghan Taliban commander, adding that Mehsud was capable of shipping foreign fighters into Afghanistan "and even [farther] west". Washington does not take the threats seriously, according to the Newsweek, but also does not rule out Mehsud could be cooperating with Al Qaeda. daily times monitor

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