Washington: The ISI continues to maintain
links with Lashkar-e-Toiba, the terrorist outfit responsible
for 26/11, and Islamabad is reluctant to take action against
its leaders and its network, several eminent US scholars and
experts of South Asia have categorically told US lawmakers.
Attending a special Congressional hearing yesterday on
`Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Growing ambition of Islamic Militancy
in Pakistan`, Congressmen unanimously expressed concern that
despite best of the efforts by the Obama Administration, the
ISI continues to maintain links with LeT and that Pakistan is
not taking decisive action against the terrorist outfit.
"The LeT is a deadly serious group of fanatics. They
are well financed, ambitious, and most disturbingly, both
tolerated by, and connected to, the Pakistani military," said
Gary L Ackerman, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on the
Middle East and South Asia of the House Committee on
International Relations.
And it is the same Pakistani military, to which the
Obama Administration is selling advanced arms, he pointed out.
Testifying before the Congressional committee, Marvin G
Weinbaum, from the Middle East Institute ?- a Washington-based
think tank, said despite the government official ban of LeT,
ISI continued to consider the organisation as an asset.
The ISI is believed to continue to share intelligence
and provide protection to LeT, he said.
"It is a measure of the impunity with which LeT is
allowed to operate in Pakistan that the authorities have been
unwilling to contain LeT chief Hafiz Mohammad Saeed.
His inflammatory remarks would be expected to land him
among the hundreds of disappeared political activists in the
country. Although he has been periodically arrested, his house
detentions have been cosmetic," Weinbaum said.
Noting that LeT poses a threat to the US national
security interests, Lisa Curtis from the Heritage Foundation
said the appearance of LeT leader Hafez Muhammed Sayeed at a
recent public rally casts grave doubts about Pakistan’s
commitment to reining in the group’s activities.
Curtis said it has been a failure of US policy to not
insist Pakistan shut down the LeT long ago. US officials have
shied away from pressuring Pakistan on the LeT in the interest
of garnering Pakistani cooperation against targets the US
believed were more critical to immediate US objectives, that
is al-Qaeda shortly after 9/11 and the Afghan Taliban more
recently.
"To degrade the overall international terrorist threat
emanating from Pakistan, the US must convince Islamabad to
confront those groups it has supported against India," Curtis
said.
The Mumbai attacks and subsequent Headley
investigations reveal that the LeT has the international
capabilities and ideological inclination to attack western
targets whether they are located in South Asia or elsewhere.
Eminent Pakistani scholar Shuja Nawaz too conceded
that the relationship between the ISI and LeT has stayed
overtime.
Nawaz is currently the director, South Asia Center,
The Atlantic Council of the United States.
"The LeT`s emerging role as a trans regional force that
has broadened its aim to include India and perhaps even
Afghanistan, by linking with the Students Islamic Movement of
India or SIMI and the Harkat ul Jihad al Islami or HUJI of
Bangladesh poses a serious threat to regional stability,"
Nawaz said.
"Another Mumbai-type attack involving the LeT might
bring India and Pakistan into conflict, a prospect that should
keep us awake at night. In Pakistan, both the civil and the
military now appear to recognise the existential threat from
home grown militancy.
"The army appears to have dislocated the Tehreek e
Taliban of Pakistan. Yet, it faces a huge and, to my mind,
greater threat in the hinterland, in the form of the LeT, he
said.
Ashley J Tellis, senior associate at the prestigious
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told lawmakers
that today LeT relies on the ISI primarily for safe haven and
political protection for its leadership, intelligence on
selected targets and threats, campaign guidance when
necessary, and infiltration assistance, particularly in regard
to long distance operations involving transits through third
countries.
"Although the interrogation of David Headley has now
established that there were clearly some shadowy ISI
connections with the Bombay attacks, the management of the LeT
detainees by the Pakistani state and the tortured progress of
their trial demonstrates that, whatever the outcome of this
charade, the ISI has simply no intention of eviscerating LeT
(or any other anti-Indian jihadi groups) because of their
perceived utility to Pakistan’s national strategy vis-à-vis
India," Tellis said.
"So long as the Pakistani Army and the security
establishment more generally conclude that their private
interests (and their conception of the national interest) are
undermined by a permanent reconciliation between India and
Pakistan, they will not rid themselves of the terrorist groups
they have begotten and which serve their purposes irrespective
of what New Delhi or Kabul or Washington may desire," he said.
"This fact ought to be understood clearly by the
Obama administration. Once it is, it may push the United
States to either compel Pakistan to initiate action against
LeT or hold Pakistan responsible for the actions of its
proxies.
If these efforts do not bear fruit, the United States
will have to contemplate unilateral actions (or cooperative
actions with other allies) to neutralize the most dangerous of
the terrorist groups now resident in Pakistan.
Doing so may be increasingly necessary not simply to
prevent a future Indo-Pakistani crisis, but more importantly
to protect the United States, its citizens, its interests, and
its allies," Tellis said.
PTI
