Months following Faisal Shahzad's attempt to bomb Times Square, the Tehrik-i-Taliban has been added to the State Department's list of designated terror groups:
Meanwhile, the State Department completed the process of labeling the Pakistani Taliban as a “foreign terrorist organization” and Mr. Mehsud and his top deputy, Wali ur-Rehman, as “specially designated global terrorists.” The move makes it a crime to provide material support to them or to do business with them, and it allows the government to freeze assets linked to them.
The State Department also announced that it would pay a reward of $5 million each for information leading to the location of Mr. Mehsud or Mr. Rehman.
The C.I.A. has been trying to kill Mr. Mehsud with drone missile attacks, and his death has been erroneously reported in the past. The criminal charges would allow the United States to seek his extradition if he were captured by another government.
The TTP was mostly focused on the Pakistani government before the U.S. escalated the drone campaign against them in an effort to sway the Pakistani government into cracking down on other militant groups in the region. Shahzad specifically mentioned the drone strikes in a rant given the day he pleaded guilty in civilian court. That's not to say that the links between the TTP and al-Qaeda aren't real, just that actions have consequences. Part of how al-Qaeda gets around its branding problem is by co-opting the causes of other, less unpopular groups and persuading them to embrace a cause of global extremism. The fact that they're all dodging American missiles these days probably has something to do with them thinking they're all in this together.
According to the New America Foundation, 52 percent of the "serious" (meaning non-aspirational) plots against the West since 2004 had direction or training from "al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan."
