Meetings of the Jourdain Society, to which members wore formal attire and carried display cabinets full of eggs, became the target of spectacular raids and stings.
It was by far the largest — using an estimated 1,000 pounds of explosives, the police said — making it the most spectacular against a Western target in Pakistan since the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in the capital, Islamabad, last September, which left more than 50 dead.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which last week released a dire warning of "spectacular" attacks on American targets, reiterated previous warnings today in an alert to state and local law enforcement officials.
As I noted in my previous post, spectacular attacks on Western targets are a reality that we have to deal with.
"They may resort to more spectacular brutality against soft targets to maintain relevance as Al Shabaab has in Kenya," a western diplomat in the capital Abuja said.
Lashkar-e-Taiba was — and still is, depending on whom you ask — a radical jihad and proselytizing organization that has carried out persistent and sometimes spectacular attacks against Indian targets, both military and civilian, in Kashmir and elsewhere.
And though there have been spectacular attacks against military targets and scores were injured in rioting in July after four protesters were shot dead by security forces, officials in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, say there are now no more than 200 militants operating in the valley, whereas at the peak of the insurgency there were up to 20 times as many.
But if the network is plotting any really spectacular attack on western targets, that conspiracy will almost certainly have been under way since long before September 11th.According to al-Qaeda's military doctrine the network is likely to put a high value on recovering senior members of the organisation who are captured.
Spectacular attacks on prestige targets attract attention - that's part of their purpose for al-Shabab.
