News
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
US uneasy about Pak political scene
* VOA report says spiraling terrorism, change in government ‘promoting anxiety’
Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: The increasing violence in Pakistan and a possible change in the new Pakistani government’s policy on fighting Taliban and Al Qaeda are a cause of concern in the US and the West, according to a Voice of America (VOA) report published on Tuesday. “Top US officials say the stakes are very high in Pakistan now that South Asia has become a region of vastly increased importance to the United States,” it said. US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told VOA that cooperation with the government in Islamabad remained “a critical component” of the US strategy against terrorism. “As Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan plays a pivotal role in the coalition’s war effort there,” he said. The report said experts were concerned that the US had centered its policy on President Pervez Musharraf, but his political allies suffered a major defeat in the February 18 parliamentary elections. Jonah Blank, the chief policy adviser for South Asia for the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, told VOA that the changes in the Pakistani political scene are causing anxiety among foreign policy planners. “From a US perspective, there is a certain amount of trepidations,” he said. Experts are concerned that the new government’s attempt to negotiate with Al Qaeda and Taliban would allow them to regroup and plot new attacks. Robert Grenier, the former head of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center and the agency’s former station chief in Islamabad, told VOA that negotiations with militants “may be tempting but they will not work”. Nicholas Schmidle, a researcher who spent the past two years in Pakistan and traveled frequently to the Tribal Areas, said militants had taken over remote areas of Pakistan by killing some 250 tribal elders and peace treaties were no longer being signed by tribal elders.
Courtesy Daily Times