Newsreal: Lone gunmen

The most serious terrorist threat to America comes not from organized or state-sponsored groups of political militants but from loners with a grudge and a gun.

By Jeff Stein

Nov 21, 1997 | While Washington was working itself into a lather over Saddam Hussein for the past two weeks, an arguably more potent face of anti-American terrorism was right here at home, in an American courtroom, hearing a jury recommend that he be executed.

Mir Aimal Kansi was not a member of a political terrorist organization when he attacked a line of cars outside CIA headquarters in 1993, killing two people and wounding three with lethal spurts of AK-47 semiautomatic rifle fire. He was an individual with a grudge, and there are many more like him out there, unhinged loners who are focusing their rage on all things American.

Last August I walked through the political environment out of which Kansi sprang when I went to Pakistan to investigate his life and eventual capture by a team of FBI, CIA and Pakistani commandos. Bumping along a stretch of broken concrete in the broiling heat of central Pakistan, my driver, Ahmad, told me a story.

"You know how Pakistan was listed No. 2 in world corruption last year?" he asked. On the horizon, like a runaway prop from "A Passage to India," the half-century-old Lahore-Karachi Express chugged by, its passengers hanging from the windows and riding on the roofs.

Yes, I said to Ahmad, I'd heard something about that. Nigeria was the worst, right?

"Actually," Ahmad said, his eyes dancing and black mustache twitching, "Pakistan was No. 1, but we bribed the Nigerians to go first."

When they're not joking, Pakistanis blame the U.S. for this rather dubious achievement. Corruption, along with a flood of heroin and AK-47s, they say, are Pakistan's principal rewards for collaborating with Washington during the Afghanistan war of 1980-89, when the CIA equipped and quarterbacked a coalition of Islamic fundamentalist rebel groups against the Soviet Red Army. With the Red Army long gone, radical Islam of the most extreme kind has triumphed in Afghanistan. And it is becoming an increasing factor in Pakistani cities, where rival Sunni and Shia extremists battle it out with leftover AK-47s.

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