This seems to be a near-daily update.This morning's Taliban incursion into the heart of Pakistan is the fifth strike in ten days.
Now this, from the New York Times, "Coordinated Attacks Strike Cultural Heart of Pakistan":
Militants dressed in police uniforms simultaneously attacked three law enforcement agencies in Lahore on Thursday morning, the fifth major attack in Pakistan in the last 10 days.More at the link. (Via Memeorandum.)
The assaults took place on the regional center of the Federal Investigation Agency and two police training centers just before 9:30 a.m. in Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province and Pakistan’s second most populous city.
More than 30 people were killed, including 19 police officers and at least 11 militants, police officials said.
Also on Thursday, militants attacked a police station in the garrison town of Kohat, killing eight people, in the North-West Frontier Province, and a car bombing killed one person in a residential complex in Peshawar, the capital of that province.
The coordinated attacks, the most sophisticated in a wave of violence that began this month, threw parts of Lahore into chaos, closing roads and shuttering shops and offices.
Five militants scaled the wall of the police training center, where more than 800 recruits had just started classes, said Maj. Gen. Shafqat Ahmed, the officer commanding security forces in Lahore.
In the ensuing two-hour battle between the hundreds of army commandos and the gunmen, one attacker was killed early on and another detonated a suicide bomb. The three surviving militants then tried to move to a residential compound, but families locked themselves inside while commandos fired on the assailants.
Six police officers were killed and seven were wounded, police officials said. In all, five of the attackers were killed, they said.
The attack on the elite school was particularly unnerving because its graduates, trained in counterterrorism techniques, are considered the toughest in the province. They wear black T-shirts with the words “No Fear” inscribed on the back and are easily distinguished by their fit physiques and well-trimmed hair.
In Islamabad, officials expressed dismay at more attacks five days after Taliban militants had attacked the nation’s army headquarters in Rawalpindi, taking more than 40 hostages and raising serious questions about the security of the military establishment in the nuclear-armed nation.
“The enemy has started a guerrilla war,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said. The nation had to unite to defeat “this handful of terrorists.”
The Taliban will continue to attack unless Pakistani forces change the way they protect their citizens, but the truth is that it simply is not in the Taliban's best interest to ignore Pakistan's relationship with the US.
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