US warns of 'unintended consequences' if Pak fails to act

WASHINGTON: Warning of "unintended consequences" if Pakistan did not act against the "non-state actors" who used its territory to stage attacks in Mumbai, the US on Wednesday said it was "working hard" to verify what Islamabad was actually doing against such elements.
    
"... I think we have to be concerned because it's obviously a time of great outrage in India. And what I emphasised was that this was a threat to both Pakistan and India these terrorists," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview to the National Public Radio.
    
Pakistan, she stressed, needed to act since its territory had been used  by "these non-state actors to make those (Mumbai) attacks."
    
"Also, Americans were killed, which gave the United States a special responsibility," Rice said.
    
Amid reports of arrest in Pakistan of Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi and Zarar Shah, the two top commanders of LeT which is blamed for the Mumbai strikes, she said she was "pleased" to see that some "important steps" are being taken in Pakistan.
    
"We are working hard to try and clarify and verify what is actually happening there, but there seem to be some positive steps being taken. The people who did this also wanted to abort what has been a positive direction in Pakistani-Indian relations," Rice said.
    
Noting that India and Pakistan were on the brink of war after the 2001 attack on Indian parliament, she said the ties between the two countries are "very different now."
    
"The Pakistani Government is a civilian government, a legitimate civilian government that has been reaching out to India, and vice versa. The Pakistani Foreign Minister was actually in India at the time that this took place. And so we have a lot to work with, and I think we're making some progress," Rice said.

Asked if she was confident that Pakistan is taking all steps and following all leads, Rice said "... they seem to be making important steps. Nobody wants to escalate this conflict. And to escalate it is simply going to invite unintended consequences and perhaps circumstances that are worse than the ones that we face now."
    
The Indian government "is working hard to improve its own counter-terrorism capability, to get the information that you need to stop attacks, to do what we did in overcoming the kind of stove-piping that is really so detrimental to using information to become knowledge, to become actionable. And the Pakistanis appear to be working to root out and to arrest  some of these people, and that's very important," she said.
    
Rice also talked of the Mumbai attacks in reference to a question on the image of the US taking a beating as a result of treatment of terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, the American detention facility in Cuba.
    
She said the US has always kept its international obligations, including the one on the Convention on Torture.
    
The US was determined after September 11 attacks to do everything that was legal and within those obligations, international and domestic laws, to make sure that it prevented a follow-on attack, Rice said.
    
"And information to prevent an attack is the long pole in the tent when you're dealing with terrorism. You can't wait until somebody's  committed a crime and then go and punish them," Rice said.
    
"... I was just in India because of the Mumbai attacks, and they were going through the same issue of how you prevent attacks and how do you get the information that you need to prevent attacks. But a lot has happened since those days," she added.