The United States has told Pakistan that last month’s Mumbai terror strikes could not be swept under the carpet
ISLAMABAD: The United States has told Pakistan that last month’s Mumbai terror strikes could not be swept under the carpet and it wasn’t doing enough to eradicate terrorism from its soil.
The message was conveyed by top American officials to Pakistan’s national security adviser Mahmud Ali Durrani, who was summoned to Washington as the US was “getting increasingly frustrated with what it views as Islamabad’s shifty and shifting position on the Mumbai attacks and their aftermath”, the Daily Times newspaper reported.
Durrani on Saturday concluded his unannounced three-day US visit, during which he met secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, his American counterpart Stephen Hadley, and Pentagon officials.
In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Rice said on Wednesday that her message to the Pakistani leadership was “...you need to deal with the terrorism problem. And it’s not enough to say these are non-state actors. If they are operating from Pakistani territory, then they have to be dealt with.”
A “much stronger message” was conveyed by Rice during a meeting with Durrani, the US and diplomatic sources were quoted as saying by Pakistani newspaper Dawn.
The Pakistani team, which included ambassador Hussain Haqqani, learnt from Rice
and Hadley that the US was not satisfied with what Islamabad “had done so far for eradicating terrorism from its soil”.
A senior diplomatic source familiar with the talks said: “The curt message that Durrani and the Pakistani team received from the Americans was: this is not 2002 and you cannot do what president [Pervez] Musharraf did after 9/11... In the past, you swept everything under the carpet while the problems were allowed to fester. No more.”
The Pakistanis were told that the Mumbai attacks were no ordinary event and the tendency in Pakistan to deal with this as a minor incident was going to hurt it, the sources said.
The US officials “insisted that they had enough evidence to prove that the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Daawa were involved in the Mumbai attacks and they wanted concrete action against all such groups”, they said.
“They told the Pakistanis to understand the gravity of the situation and the seriousness of the evidence that exists to Pakistan’s links to this event,” said a source.
“The message the Americans gave was: this is the third time we are saying such a thing. We may not be able to bail you out the fourth time. Global terrorism is not just an India-Pakistan dispute. We see LeT and Jamaat on par with al-Qaeda. Pakistan should stop thinking of this as just another round of India-Pakistan altercations,” the source said.
The Pakistani embassy in Washington kept Durrani’s visit under wraps and did not tell journalists about his arrival or the reason for his visit.
Contradictory statements on the Mumbai attacks from the top Pakistani leadership have cast doubts on Islamabad’s “willingness, and even its ability, to take the follow-up action it has committed itself to,” the Daily Times said.
Rice also told Durrani that Pakistan “needs to do better and while declarations of good intent are to be commended, they have to be translated through actions”, it reported.
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