Canada's Official Terror Blacklist

Canada's federal government has placed the Pakistani Taliban on its official blacklist. Links to the Pakistan-based jihadists have been seen in various plots uncovered over the past several years. Home-grown jihadists who have been apprehended while in the planning stages of attacks within Canada have been seen to have links through training, with Pakistan.

"By listing this group as a terrorist entity, it will be illegal for any individual, group or association to knowingly assist Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan in raising funds, in protecting its assets or in any other way financially assisting the organization. Listing is one weapon in the government's arsenal to disrupt and dismantle terrorist networks that threaten our safety." Foreign Minister John Baird

Two Ottawa men arrested last year for plotting attacks within Canada, and another from London, Ontario were linked with training in Pakistan. Mohamed Harket was arrested in Ottawa on a security certificate from CSIS as a suspected sleeper agent for al-Qaeda, and he had links to Pakistan training camps, as did one of the original 'Toronto 18' plot members, and the country's first convicted terrorist, Ottawa-based Momin Khawaja.

The New American Foundation study has released data concluding that most of the major terrorist plots committed or planned and interrupted against the West had links to training camps in Pakistan. Many of those who travelled to Pakistan from Europe and North America planned to fight the 'foreign invaders' (NATO troops) fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but were persuaded to return to the West and launch attacks there.

But it is not just the Taliban who continue to pose a threat in and to Pakistan, the West and surrounding Muslim countries. For al-Qaeda has found invaluable and secure safe haven there and is well entrenched within the remote, mountainous tribal areas of the North West Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pakistan's rugged frontier.

The RCMP charged two men from Winnipeg, accused of travelling to Pakistan for terrorist training, one of whom, Ferid Imam, is accused of having been a training camp instructor. Who, in that capacity trained three American jihadists who made an attempt to bomb areas in New York. U.S. interrogation documents cite Mr. Imam as having:

"Provided instructions about the rewards of fighting and dying for jihad, and also instructed the New York trio in how to use various weapons such as AK-47s, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers."

Pakistan's fall from grace has been steady and irreversible. For years Western powers, particularly the United States, which invested billions in aid to the country for its armed forces, considered Pakistan an ally in the war against terror. All the while Pakistan was hosting and accelerating terror, if not the government itself, then through its armed forces and secret intelligence having been well infiltrated by violent jihadists.

That Pakistan is also a nuclear-arms-producing country and that it has recently decided to increase its nuclear arsenal does not bode particularly well for the future. Another reality is that violent Pakistani Islamists have demonstrated their ability to inveigle themselves into supposedly secure and sensitive areas of the country to wreak damage as they willed. There is no area in Pakistan that can be said to be completely safe from Islamist attack.

Including the country's nuclear installations, a few of which have come very close to being breached.