Feinstein issued that call in a Tuesday press conference following an intelligence briefing her committee received from the FBI, the National Counterterrorist Center and the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of the attempt. Her co-chairman, Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), was more cautious about attributing blame to Pakistani extremist groups, though Bond appears to have napped during the briefing. While both Feinstein and Bond characterized that the extremist groups’ culpability as unproven, Feinstein said that suspect Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized U.S. citizen, received “training while he was in Pakistan, specifically Waziristan, from the Taliban.”

This afternoon, Feinstein’s office released a letter the chairwoman sent to Secretary Clinton, seeking the new designation for the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network. The full letter:

Dear Secretary Clinton:

I write to urge you to add the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) (commonly known as the “Pakistani Taliban”) to the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations and to consider adding other terrorist groups to the existing list of forty-five designated terrorist groups.

I believe that there are several terrorist groups – like the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network – not currently designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations that meet the following criteria laid out by section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act:

(1) The organization is foreign;
(2) The organization engages in terrorist activity; and
(3) The terrorist activity threatens the security of United States citizens or the national security of the United States.

I believe the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network clearly meet all three criteria. I also believe the list of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations must be reviewed and updated on a routine basis given the evolving and multiplying number of terrorist groups and the militant groups with which they associate that threaten our national security, especially those in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

Designating more groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations would enable law enforcement and our Intelligence Community to: (1) curb terrorism financing to the group, (2) bar foreign nationals with ties to the group from entering the U.S. and remove them from the U.S. in some instances, and (3) ban material support to the group.

Thank you very much for your attention to this matter and for your continued good work to protect the national security of the United States.

Sincerely yours,

Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

And if Bond got amped with us, that might be because he had plenty of time to relax during the briefing:

One person who was in the room for Tuesday’s intelligence briefing said Bond appeared to fall asleep for 10 to 15 minutes, but that he and other senators had spirited exchanges with the briefers.

That’s via Ben Frumin and Matthew Yglesias. Bond also said in his press conference that he was upset it took ten days to get the intelligence community to brief him and the Senate intelligence committee in the first place. So he couldn’t have had an extra cup of coffee when the briefers trudged to the Hart building?

The New York Times’s Robert Mackey has footage of the attack aired by Pakistan’s Geo TV. You see a really big boom, right above a Pepsi billboard, and billowing mushroom clouds of smoke. It’s easy to believe that the Taliban penetrated the compound, which is surely why the video exists.

Contrast that with the December attack on a CIA headquarters in eastern Afghanistan that left at least seven CIA operatives and a Blackwater contractor dead, all at the hands of an al-Qaeda double agent. That was perhaps the single greatest loss of life in CIA history. (It also appears to have sparked a retaliatory up-tempo in drone strike operations.) But it wasn’t filmed, for the obvious reason that the attacker had no intention of making it out alive.

Khost was a big terrorist success. Peshawar was a negligible one, and perhaps now a wake-up call to the consulate and other diplomatic presences in Pakistan. But as a media event, all the Taliban may have been after is projecting strength, rather than demonstrating it.

Update, 11:03 a.m.: I should say that between this attack and another complex one elsewhere in Pakistan, the Taliban have killed at least 3 dozen Pakistani civilians and security forces today. I did not mean to imply that U.S. assets are the only “real” targets the Taliban seeks in Pakistan, only that as a U.S.-vs-extremists event, the attack on the consulate was in fact negligible.

The tribal militia, known as a Lashkar, is outside the tribal areas where the Pakistani Army is expected to next strike the Taliban. It would be much easier, for obvious reasons, if the Army had local Lashkar auxiliaries in such places, since then the Army will be able to cite a measure of popular support for the offensive, and will have a counterresponse to al-Qaeda and the Taliban’s inevitable charge that it’s acting as an American proxy. McClatchy collects this explanatory quote:

“The most important thing is to mobilize the people of the area (the north west), restore their trust,” said Najmuddin Khan, a government minister from Dir. “Then, there would be no need to use the army. We’d take care of the problem ourselves.”

There appear not to be similar indicators of Lashkars forming in places like Waziristan, where al-Qaeda’s support is presumably more entrenched. But The Wall Street Journal finds mounting anger with the Taliban and its terrorist allies from refugees from the tribal areas, which may presage the formation of such Lashkars or may not. According to the Journal, one inhibiting factor would be, unsurprisingly, U.S.-caused civilian casualties:

“Each time there is badly aimed artillery firing or the Americans fire missiles, if one person is killed, all his brothers and sons and cousins join the Taliban,” said Hazrat Muhammad, 36, who last year fled fighting in the Mohmand tribal area near South Waziristan.

Even among those, such as Mr. Muhammad, who say they now oppose the Taliban, there’s deep distrust of the government, which has done little for the tribal areas since Pakistan was created six decades ago.

It should be clear that the combatants who kill fewer civilians and demonstrate greater concern for the needs of the population will be the ones who gain active and passive support for attacking their enemies. It’s not about winning “hearts and minds” — a misleading and problematic framework for counterinsurgency, since this isn’t about ideological bandwagoning — it’s winning heartbeats and stomachs. (Admittedly this phrase needs precision.) And that’s one lesson that really does transfer from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pakistani Army’s offensive in Waziristan is bound to be arduous, and will occur in an area believed to be where al-Qaeda’s senior leadership is operating. We can’t do the job for the Pakistanis. But we can make their task less difficult by heeding the Center for a New American Security’s call to “strictly curtail” U.S. drone strikes in the area.

Additionally, Josh Foust explained a few weeks ago why supporting tribal militias in Pakistan isn’t nearly as problematic as supporting them in Afghanistan and why the Lashkars will need the support of the Pakistani government to succeed.

In stark contrast to that racist denialism is Iftikhar Chaudhry, the newly-reinstated chief justice of Pakistan whose return to the Supreme Court was the condition for defusing last month’s political crisis between President Asif Ali Zardari and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif. Chaudhry ordered the government to facilitate a round of testimony from the woman about her public torture, and is using its lack of compliance as a vehicle for interrogating its decision to allow the Pakistani Taliban a new safe haven in Swat. The New York Times reports:

Chaudhry, assailed the officials for laziness and self-importance, and challenged them for not taking up the case until it became a national scandal in recent days, when a video showing the woman pinned to the ground and repeatedly whipped by a Taliban commander was broadcast on Pakistani television.

“Before the video became public, what were you doing, why couldn’t you find out what had happened?” Mr. Chaudhry asked the attorney general, Sardar Latif Khosa.

By choosing to highlight the terror in Swat, Mr. Chaudhry, who has been back on the bench about two weeks after two years of enforced limbo, immediately returned to his role of shaming an acquiescent government and military into acting in the face of wrongdoing.

It’s good to see Chaudhry, a force for liberalism in Pakistan, tying together human rights and counterterrorism.