The time is long overdue to get tough with young adults who believe that a visit to grandma in Pakistan should include a few months at a Taliban or Al Qaeda training camp.
I have an idea: if you're either a native born American or a naturalized American citizen of Pakistani descent and you won't voluntarily limit your visit to Pakistan to no more than two weeks, you automatically get onto the TSA watch list. If you don't return in two weeks you are automatically placed on the "No Fly List." Unless you can satisfactorily prove to the TSA you have a damn good reason to be spending more time in Pakistan beyond two weeks and deserve to be exempted from the exclusion, tough luck, buddy, you ain't getting onto a U.S. bound flight.
Anyone who thinks this is racial profiling is grasping at a very thin straw.
An examination of recent successful and aborted terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom and the United States have one thing in common: unexplained repeated entries and exits from Pakistan by second generation naturalized citizens prior to the actual perpetration of an attack.
Just take a look at Times Square bomber wannabe Faisal Shahzad. He was either self-radicalized or radicalized not by Al Qaeda per se but likely by the Pakistani Taliban terrorist organization - an expansion of the terror threat against the homeland. His travel DNA is revealing. Before the aborted attack last week, he returned from Pakistan on February 3 having spent FIVE MONTHS there. Moreover, Shahzad may/may have had something to do with a Pakistani militant involved in the Mumbai terrorist attacks two years ago.
Pakistan is a veritable terrorism supermarket and has become ground zero of Salafist terrorism and its supporters -- no thanks to an indifferent Pakistani government that has consistently turned a blind eye to to the threats its own intelligence agency -- the ISI help incubate more often than not.
Fortunately, the civilian Pakistani leadership has awakened to the threat, but it is weak and fraught with turmoil and unable to adequately control the ISI or the Pakistani military.
There are thousands of law abiding Pakistani immigrants living peacefully in the U.S. No one immigrant group has the organizational capacity to know whether any of their progeny may be up to no good. That is why it's time to compel anyone traveling to Pakistan to answer to federal authorities given the altered terrorist terrain there. Had Shahzad been forced to comply with this requirement... he either would have stayed here or never made it back here.
Better safer than sorrier.