In an interview with the Press Trust of India, President Barack Obama, while paying tribute to Pakistan’s initiatives against terrorism, urged Pakistan to take additional effective actions against terrorist groups within the country. Regarding the situation in the region, the U.S. president felt that Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif understands that instability in Pakistan poses a threat to peace in the whole region. He further stated that conducting operations against all terrorists uniformly is the right policy. About India, the U.S. president indicated that India and the U.S. can become important partners in this century. He appreciated that the Indian prime minister contacted his Pakistani counterpart by phone following the Pathankot attack. Obama further said that the leaders of both countries, India and Pakistan, are engaged in a dialogue on how to confront extremism and terrorism across the region. There should be no place in the world for militants, he said, and they should pay for their actions. President Obama noted that following the Peshawar attack, Pakistani security forces have taken action against numerous extremist groups. The prime target for terrorists is Islamabad itself. President Obama said that Pakistan has to show that it is serious about exterminating terrorist networks.
President Obama has, however, made conflicting statements. On the one hand he praises Pakistan’s initiatives against terrorism. On the other hand he says that Pakistan needs to demonstrate it is serious about the matter of destroying terrorist networks. At the same time, he also points out that Islamabad itself is the target of terrorism. It appears that Obama is ignorant about the details of operations conducted by Pakistan, in which Pakistan destroyed the infrastructure of terrorism throughout the tribal areas including North Waziristan, capturing thousands of terrorists and killing hundreds in the process. While huge numbers of terrorists as well as their facilitators are present in Pakistan at this time, no terrorist network is present.
The fight against terrorism was imposed upon Pakistan, but the U.S. agencies and forces present in Afghanistan made no serious effort to find and destroy the terrorists, including Mullah Fazlulallah, who escaped from Pakistan to Afghanistan after the Swat battle. The angry Balochis of Afghanistan, including Brahamdagh Bugti, sat in Kabul and arranged for sabotage in Baluchistan, but the former Karzai government of Afghanistan and NATO forces looked the other way, ignoring this terrorism against Pakistan. It is also important in this regard that action be taken against the members of the banned Tehrik–e–Taliban of Pakistan who are hiding in Afghanistan. The claim was made recently that Mullah Fazlullah was killed in a drone attack, but the terrorists have denied this. Instead of demanding that we “do more,” the U.S. itself needs to “do more” in Pakistan’s interest.
Pakistan’s droll effrontery pretending they’re not their own worst enemy, with their theocratic disaster of a government, would be amusing without nuclear bombs.
As things stand, their nationalist craziness is terrifying, especially to India.
Obama and every president who comes after need to mind their own business, not keep running across the globe to save countries from terrorism and thereby the hegemony of America.
The business of American presidents from now on will be attending to the terrible consequences of a failed economic system that keeps rapidly increasing inequality and crumbling infrastructure. It seems clear that Obama has been protected from seeing the multiplying pockets of misery and the tent cities — some of them years old — that disfigure the face of America. Nor does he have to drive over bridges that may crumble beneath him, or highways that might give way to sinkholes.
It’s high time that reading terrorism as an act of war be regarded as the political illusion it is. The US has poured billions of dollars into the Pakistani economy with which to build a counterterrorism strategy. Pakistan should long ago been able to manage their own terrorists. All that cash could have been invested in InterPol and that agency made respectable — and capable.