By Jack Detsch
With Washington’s patience and money fading, is time running out for Pakistan’s offensive against domestic terrorism?
Barely a month after Secretary of State John Kerry paid a surprise visit to Islamabad to parley with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, floating promises of emergency aid to fight militants, Congress has put its gripes with America’s fickle counterterrorism partner in ink. On February 12, the leaders of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, California Republican Ed Royce and New York Democrat Eliot Engel, wrote (PDF) a letter to Kerry, urging the State Department to consider travel bans, suspending assistance, and imposing sanctions on corrupt officials until Islamabad can regain the initiative against the Pakistani Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Haqqani network. “We appreciate that you and other senior-level Administration officials regularly raised the need to confront these groups with Pakistani officials,” Royce and Engel wrote, referencing Kerry’s January trip. “Yet it does not appear that this engagement has resulted in any real change in Pakistan’s policies.”
Royce and Engel’s concerns stemmed from Pakistan’s muted response to a Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar last December, which left almost 150 people dead. But just hours after Kerry received the note, events in Pakistan continued to inflame that argument. On February 13, three Taliban assailants hurled grenades, exchanged gunfire with police, and detonated a suicide vest at a Shia mosque in Peshawar, leaving 20 dead. The fundamentalists continued their attacks on February 17, when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a crowd of people in Lahore, killing five and injuring dozens more.
Those attacks come at a critical time in Pakistan’s fight against the militants. Since June, Islamabad has ramped up operations against Taliban enclaves in North Waziristan, a mountainous slice of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where Sharif’s government exercises little formal control. Though the effort, dubbed Zarb-e-Azb, has been wracked with false starts and casualties, in welcoming Pakistan’s Interior Minister Ali Khan to Washington on Thursday, Kerry offered praise for the campaign. “They are committed to going after terrorists, all forms of extremism in Pakistan,” Kerry said. “And they are making good on that in their initiatives in the western part of the country and elsewhere, and in their cooperation on counterterrorism.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat