‘War Against Terror’: Whose Ally Is Pakistan?

India’s claims for over a decade about Pakistan’s links with terrorism in Kashmir, and elsewhere, stand vindicated again by a recent US state department’s report released in Washington on Monday.

The USA never took India’s repeated warnings seriously, and always shoved them under the carpet. The usual response is “Well, Pakistan is our front-line ally in war-against-terror.”

Now with repeated evidence surfacing in American intelligence reports, the US administration, which during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan itself encouraged Islamic militants, is finding it difficult to face the reality.

“Pakistan ‘remains a major source of Islamic extremism and a safe haven for some top terrorist leaders’, despite being a front-line ally of the United States in the ‘war on terror’, according to the US State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2006, says Pakistan’s Daily Times Monitor.

“The state department report also said the Bush administration had designated Islamic groups Harkatul Mujahideen (HUM), Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba– all said to be based in Pakistan – as foreign terrorist organisations,’ prohibiting US residents from extending material support to them.

“The report says HUM and JeM are politically aligned with the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party led by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, and operate primarily in Indian-held Kashmir.”

The State Department report was released on Monday in Washington. Indian leaders and the media are so disillusioned and tired of the US administration’s stand that such ‘alarming’ news do not make headlines in the country. In fact, India has stopped complaining!!!

But there is another angle to this story. The US state department report is based on last year’s findings. Meanwhile perceptions in India and Pakistan are also undergoing a change.

Interestingly, India and Pakistan seem to have realised that they have no alternative but to engage in bilateral talks/strategies to promote trade, etc, and work towards ending the US interference in their affairs.

Both the countries are realising the dangers of remaining a pawn of the outside powers, especially in the wake of disastrous/adventurist US policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Behind-the-scene parleys have yielded dramatic results in bringing down terrorist killings and improved the trade between India and Pakistan.To read my earlier post please click here…

Whatever the dangers inherent in this, India has little choice but to enter into bilateral parleys with vigour.

I reprint in full an editorial on this subject in Pakistan’s Daily Times:

“Pakistan’s untamed militias”

“The US State Department’s annual country report says Pakistan ‘remains a major source of Islamic extremism and a safe haven for some top terrorist leaders’, despite being a frontline ally of the United States in the ‘war on terror’.

“The report names all the ‘Islamic groups’ that survive in Pakistan under assumed names after they were banned under their original names. President Pervez Musharraf made efforts to tame these groups but for reasons not very clear to most Pakistanis he has not been able to put the militias to rest.

“Militias are created when deniable covert wars are fought. Pakistan spawned them under the approving eye of the United States when it was helping defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Then Pakistan used them against India in Kashmir.

“Over time it so got used to its militias — named nicely in Urdu — that it forgot that they are the source of other things like terrorism and sectarian massacres too.

“Now they are embedded in civil society and rule through intimidation. Who is subject to this intimidation? The judiciary, clearly, but all the other institutions of the state, including the political parties and the media, are liable to attack. How can any state function like this?”

The Malaysia Sun has an interesting story on Pakistan and nuclear dimension. “Pakistani authorities prepared Wednesday to address potentially damaging new details contained in a report on the black market sale of sensitive technology by the former head of the country’s nuclear programme, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan.” Please click here for more…

Meanwhile violent protests continue in Pakistan over the sacking, and the trial, of the Chief Justice. Read here…