Pakistan’s Terror Inc.

Most terrorist trails lead back to Pakistan, Britain’s MI5 (internal intelligence service) concluded a year ago.

An average of some 400,000 Pakistani Brits a year fly back to the old country for vacation or to visit their relatives. From the airports in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, where they land, side trips to the madrassas — Koranic schools — where they were originally radicalized, or to a terrorist training camp in the tribal areas that straddle the Pakistani-Afghan border, go undetected.

There is no way to keep track of thousands of passengers arriving from the United Kingdom every day. Nor can MI5 cope with up to 1,000 a day returning to their U.K. homes from trips to Pakistan.

Since September 11, 2001, German intelligence services were happy to report to Western colleagues they had no such problem with Germany’s 2.8 million-strong Turkish minority — mostly second- and third-generation German-speaking Turks long established and integrated in German life.

Last week, a high-ranking German internal security delegation met with heads of several U.S. intelligence agencies to explain how their comfortable assumptions had to be re-examined. German intelligence services have uncovered a direct al Qaeda link from Germany via Turkey to Pakistan — for young radicalized German Turks.

Mostly recruited on the Internet from al Qaeda Web sites, these terrorist wannabes have made their way to al Qaeda’s privileged sanctuaries in the Pakistani tribal belt that straddles the Afghan border. German security has uncovered more than 100 such cases.

Topic A for last week’s German visitors with their U.S. counterparts was Pakistan — and what to do about the privileged sanctuaries al Qaeda and Taliban have secured in at least three of the seven tribal agencies known as FATA (for Federally Administered Tribal Areas).

Western intelligence services agree that U.S. and NATO forces now in Afghanistan can only mark time and lose ground to Taliban until FATA’s safe havens are rooted out militarily.

This would have to be coupled with economic aid for tribes whose lifestyle hasn’t changed much since the fourth century B.C. when Alexander the Great gave the Hindu Kush a wide berth, hurried through Afghanistan before finding the Khyber Pass to exit into India’s Punjab to what is now Pakistan’s cultural capital of Lahore.

The terrain is one of the world’s most difficult — jagged mountains rising to 15,000 feet interspersed with valleys, deep and narrow ravines, crevices and fissures, all dotted with thousands of caves with concealed entrances.

The millions of Pashtun tribesmen that inhabit the tribal areas share a centuries-old code called “Badal,” or revenge. Also a moral code known as Pashtunwalli — or hospitality is sacred.

Under steady Bush administration pressure since the Battle of Tora Bora in November and December 2001, when Osama bin Laden and some 50 terrorist cohorts escaped, then acting President Pervez Musharraf ordered some 35,000 troops into FATA where they had been forbidden to go by treaty since independence in 1947. These were gradually increased to 100,000. (In an interview published Friday, Mr. Musharraf emphatically ruled out having U.S. troops join the fight against al Qaeda on Pakistani soil.)

A 50,000-strong Frontier Corps (FC) of locals was also created. Most of the Pakistani soldiers are Punjabis — or Urdu-speaking foreigners for the Pashtun. They hate being there and the locals hate them back, killing more than 1,000 Pakistani regulars and wounding 3,000.

No sooner did Mr. Musharraf order Special Forces to attack the Taliban-seized Red Mosque in downtown Islamabad last Aug. 1 than Pakistani frontier units stood down. Ambushed by Taliban fighters, some 200 Pakistani soldiers surrendered without firing a shot.

Most were released two weeks later but not before signing a pledge never to attack Pashtuns again. A handful opted to join their captors. Ill-equipped FC auxiliaries also surrendered their old weapons by the score. They had been issued only 10 bullets each.

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