Obama's flawed Af-Pak policy has united terrorists: Lodhi

The Af-Pak policy of the Obama Administration is flawed, which has only united the various terrorist groups in the region who have now created an alliance, former Pakistani envoy to the US Maleeha Lodhi has said.

"If the flawed concept of AF-PAK has achieved anything at all so far, it has done so by uniting the militants on both sides of the border in a new alliance to resist the impending military troop deployments in southern Afghanistan," Lodhi said while delivering a key-note address at the National Defence University.

"For now, the militants have read AF-PAK very quickly and have created an alliance which did not exist before," she said.

Observing that the various elements of Pakistan Taliban were never united, and certainly now always united with the objectives of Afghan Taliban, Lodhi said: "Today they are. They are because they wish to focus their efforts in resisting the US troop surge in Afghanistan."

Lodhi said the Pakistani establishment too is not happy with the Af-Pak policy either.

"Islamabad also finds unsettling the notion or the concept of treating Pakistan's and Afghanistan's border region as a single theater of combat," she said.

"It is one thing to use this AF-PAK acronym or concept to urge greater coordination and great cooperation. It's quite another to deduce from this or conclude from this that one size will fit both because both countries security trajectories are different, the capacities are different, the nature of the threat is really quite different also," Lodhi argued.