Feeling comfortable about all of those assurances that the Taliban could never get their hands on Pakistan’s nukes? Better not read this Times of India report or their video, which tells a dirty little secret that neither Islamabad or Washington wants anyone to know. The Taliban have conducted three attacks on nuclear sites — and while they haven’t succeeded in getting to nuclear materials, they’ve improved after each attack:

Pakistan’s nuclear facilities have already been attacked at least thrice by its home-grown extremists and terrorists in little reported incidents over the last two years, even as the world remains divided over
the safety and security of the nuclear weapons in the troubled country, according to western analysts.

The incidents, tracked by Shaun Gregory, a professor at Bradford University in UK, include an attack on the nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha on November 1, 2007, an attack on Pakistan’s nuclear airbase at Kamra by a suicide bomber on December 10, 2007, and perhaps most significantly the August 20, 2008 attack when Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew up several entry points to one of the armament complexes at the Wah cantonment, considered one of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons assembly. …

In fact, the attacks have received so little attention that Peter Bergen, the eminent terrorism expert who reviewed Gregory’s paper first published in West Point’s Counter Terrorism Center Sentinel, said “he (Gregory) points out something that was news to me (and shouldn’t have been) which is that a series of attacks on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons facilities have already happened.”

As the Times of India explains, the nuclear facilities in Pakistan are actually more vulnerable to Taliban and al-Qaeda attack — because Pakistan built them in Taliban strongholds. When Islamabad first started developing its nuclear-weapons program, it wanted to keep them safe from attack by India, so they kept them as far away from the Indian border as possible. The Pakistanis wanted the facilities out of the reach of an armored border invasion by India, preferably across the Indus.

Where would that be? Oh, places like Wah, Fatehjang, Golra Sharif, Kahuta, Sihala, Isa Khel Charma, Tarwanah, and Taxila — which all border or are in Taliban territory. Places like the Northwest Frontier Province, one of the places where Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are thought to securely hide from American wrath.

Still feel secure?