Attacking Pakistan for its selective approach to battling terrorism, two experts from The Heritage Foundation, Washington’s leading conservative think tank, have urged the Obama administration to pressure Islamabad to snap links with all terrorist outfits operating against India and Afghanistan.
“The Pakistan army’s risky double game of selectively supporting some terrorist groups threatens US national security objectives of rooting out global terrorism from South Asia,” write lisa Curtis and Huma Sattar. “So long as Pakistan’s military allows groups that follow an extremist Islamist ideology to operate freely, they make their territory an environment in which global terrorism can flourish.”
Citing the controversial granting of bail to Zaki-ur-Rehman lakhvi, mastermind of the laskhar-e-Tayyeba’s 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, the two experts note in their commentary: “If Pakistan is indeed serious about combatting terrorism, it must come down hard on all terrorist groups and break all links with terrorists operating in Afghanistan and India. US policy must insist on this outcome.”
They have referred to the concern on both sides of the aisle in the US Congress on this issue. In a joint letter to Secretary of State John Kerry last month, Republican Ed Royce and Democrat Eliot Engel, chairman and ranking member respectively of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, pointed out that Pakistan has not done all it could to root out terrorist groups such as leT, lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and Jaish-e-Muhmmad because they are seen as serving Pakistan’s foreign policy goals in India and Afghanistan.
Curtis, a former State Department staffer and a long-time senior research fellow at Heritage, and Sattar, a visiting analyst, also advanced the argument that Pakistan’s dual policies towards terrorism “raise the chances of another Indo-Pakistani conflict that could potentially go nuclear”.