Baitullah Mehsud: Public Enemy No. 1?

Foreign Policy has a profile up of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud (h/t Abu Muqawama), who they frame as the United States' new public enemy number one - "Meet the New Osama Bin Laden," they say.

According to FP, the diabetic, hypertensive Mehsud's influence is growing, and he is of "particular concern" to the West because of fears that Pakistan (a nuclear state) is at risk of being overrun by the Taliban. (It's hard to vet that claim, by the way, and part of me feels like Pakistan is not on the edge of disaster, just yet.)

The U.S. bombed Mehsud's training camps twice in February, and has hit him several times since then, but the subtext to this story of America v. Mehsud could be America's reluctance or inability to kill Mehsud or cripple his organization.

According to the February New York Times story that documented the training camp strikes, "Pakistani military and intelligence officials have complained about Washington's refusal to strike at Baitullah Mehsud, even while C.I.A. drones struck at Qaeda figures and leaders of the network run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a militant leader believed responsible for a campaign of violence against American troops in Afghanistan."

You'd think it would be easy for us, as Abu Muqawama puts it, to pay a visit to Baitullah with a Predator.

The conspiracy theorists believe that the U.S. is enabling, if not outright supporting Mehsud's operations, because America wants the threat to Pakistan to be so grave as to warrant a Gulf War-like intervention.

Mehsud, the leader of the Tekrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, has reportedly violently dismantled local leadership in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pakistan's famously lawless borderland with Afghanistan. Thus, there are few suitable warlords for Pakistan to play against Mehsud. The TTP has been implicated by Pakistan and the United States in the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

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