I notice that some people have found the idea that there's still a bonafide al-Qaeda camp operating in Pakistan as somewhat alarming and Newsweek has a web exclusive devoted to the topic.
As Evan Kohlmann notes in the article, it's been pretty common news in the counter-terrorism community that there were al-Qaeda training camps operating in Waziristan for quite some time now, though most of those camps are reputed to have been destroyed or at least dismantled during the Pakistani military offensive in April 2004. I'm not so sure, however, that it was one of those camps that "al-Qaeda next door" Hamid Hadayat was attending.
One of the clues that is highly suggestive to me is that Hadayat's devotion to jihad included a pledge to fight in Kashmir.
As was painfully illustrated in the case of French al-Qaeda operative Willie Brigitte, he and any number of other al-Qaeda recruits are still quite free to attend Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) camps supervised and manned by al-Qaeda instructors. The LeT also harbored al-Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaydah and has also been sent volunteers to fight against US forces in Iraq.
The bottom line is that as long as the LeT camps are still in business, there are going to be many, many more Hamid Hadayats.
Just wait till they start finding out about all the al-Qaeda infrastructure that's still up and running in Somalia...
Camps in Waziristan are known to still operate, however this camp that Hayat attended was not in Waziristan and allegedly near a major Pakistani city. No, there should not be shock or awe over thig, but it is just one more wrinkle on the page concerning our allies in Pakistan.
Dan & Chad,
You guys have got it right. As a result of Musharraf's phoney distinction of good and bad jihadis, the Waziristan camps are receiving the attention while the Punjab & Pakistani-occupied Kashmir ones function outside the glare of (media?) attention.
Rawalpindi, where the Lodi boys trained at, is the epicentre of Pakistan's military and intelligence machine. Musharraf probably drives past these camps twice a day on his way to and back from work.
If you look at the coverage of Faheem Lodhi's trial in Australia, you'll notice that two of the Virginia Jihad network members testified. As far as I can tell, they didn't meet Lodhi at the LeT camp, but they did meet Brigitte. Brigitte said as much in his statement to the French judge.