Meet Baitullah Mehsud, the next Osama

He controls significant territory in Pakistan. He runs training camps for European jihadi wannabes. He may have masterminded the assassination of Benazir Bhutto — and he wants to “eradicate the White House, New York, and London”. Baitullah Mehsud may be the next Osama bin Laden, only even more difficult to find (via William Amos):

Pictures obtained by CBS News from Pakistani sources are among the first public images ever to surface of a man U.S. intelligence officials call “one of the most dangerous people on the planet,” CBS News justice and homeland security correspondent Bob Orr reports.

He is Pakistani warlord Baitullah Mehsud, the accused mastermind of the Benazir Bhutto assassination. An emerging leader, sources say, who threatens to eclipse Osama bin Laden as the world’s top terrorist.

Terrorism analyst Christine Fair says Baitullah Mehsud is running a training camp for suicide bombers in Pakistan’s off-limits tribal region — a magnet for radical Islamic recruits from Europe and potentially the United States.

Mehsud wants to fight a two-front war from his hideout in Pakistan. He has targeted the Pakistani political structure, not just in assassinating Bhutto but also in his land grab in Swat. If he can resist the Pakistani Army’s attempts to oust him from what once was a tourist destination, he will gain enormous prestige among the radical Islamists, and he will undermine the political and military leadership of Pakistan.

That would only be the first step for Mehsud. His vision matches that of bin Laden — an Islamic caliphate that will rule the world in Allah’s name. His ambitions do not include having his face at the head of the movement, however. Mehsud learned that broadcasting one’s face around the world makes one an easier target. Osama might gain followers with his rhetoric and his public relations, but Mehsud wants warriors who come to share in his success.

So far, that success has eluded him outside of Pakistan. He sent terrorists to attack the transportation systems of Europe, but Western intelligence services exposed the plot before it had a chance to launch. That might dim the enthusiasm of volunteers, but Mehsud will not stop trying to conduct his attacks. He just needs the right combination of suicidal Westerners to get through the intel services’ surveillance and a little bit of luck, and he only needs to succeed once.

The key difference between Osama in 1997 and Mehsud in 2008 is 9/11. This time, we’re not so inclined to dismiss radical Islamist terrorists who claim that they will take over the world. We learned an important lesson in 2001 about the dangers of leaving these threats until they actually attack. We need to force Mehsud out from under his rock and into the daylight, where we can put an end to his plans before he has a chance to set them in motion — if he hasn’t already done so.