BACKGROUND AND ALLEGATIONS
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2008/05_terrorism_byman/05_terrorism_byman.pdf
Pakistan is perhaps the world's most active sponsor of terrorist groups—sponsorship that includes aiding groups that pose a direct threat to the United States. In its support, Pakistan spans the range of categories listed in the preceding section: actively backing some groups, maintaining contacts with others, turning a blind eye to yet more groups, and in some cases lacking the capacity to shut down radicalism it opposes. In addition, support for terrorism in Pakistan is a broad based activity, involving an array of government and non-state actors.
Islamabad has long worked with many different groups linked to jihadists in its fight to wrest Kashmir from India. In this fight, Pakistan worked with groups such as Lashkar-e Tayyaba (LeT), Jaish-e Muhammad and Harakat ul-Mujahedin to train jihadists to fight in Kashmir. Many of these groups were temporarily banned or forced to change their names in response to U.S. pressure after 9/11. Nonetheless, they or their successors remain active with Pakistani government support.11 Pakistan played an instrumental role in the creation and advancement of the Taliban in the 1990s, with the Pakistani Army and the ISI working closely with the Taliban at all levels. In addition, support for fighters in Afghanistan was one of the main reasons for the creation of LeT, and this was done with the assistance of Osama bin Laden himself.
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http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/library/congress/1994_cr/pd_cong_speech.html
PAKISTAN'S LINKS WITH FUNDAMENTALISM AND INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM
HON. PETER DEUTSCH OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Friday, October 7, 1994
Mr. DEUTSCH.
Mr. Speaker, I am shocked to see reports detailing the extensive involvement of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in supporting Islamic fundamentalist terror groups in Afghanistan and India.
PAKISTAN'S INVOLVEMENT IN NARCO-TERRORISM
(Mr. FINGERHUT asked and was given permission to address the House for 1
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
The role played by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence Agency in exporting terror to Kashmir and Punjab in neighboring India was sufficiently well-documented for the previous administration to place the country on the watch list of states sponsoring terrorism. Its removal from that list is justified neither by its past track record nor by its present performance. The State Department's most recent report on Global Patterns of Terrorism talks of credible reports in 1993 of official Pakistani support to Kashmiri militants who undertook attacks of terrorism in
Indian-controlled Kashmir.
The administration cannot afford to ignore the Washington Post report. Mr. Speaker, a country that produces 70 tons of heroin annually and accounts for a significant part of the heroin consumed in the U.S. market is a matter of concern under any circumstances. That a part of the same country's intelligence establishment can conceive blueprints to use profits from smuggling these drugs for supporting insurgency in Kashmir and export of
terror elsewhere is a fact that we ignore at our own peril.
PAKISTAN'S UNACCEPTABLE POLICY
HON. ROBERT MENENDEZ OF NEW JERSEY
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Friday, October 7, 1994
Recently, troubling reports have surfaced which allege that India's neighbor, Pakistan, is covertly promoting instability in the Jammu, Kashmir, and Himachal regions of India.
In fact, according to the U.S. State
Department's "Global Report on Terrorism for 1994," there were credible reports of official Pakistani support to Kashmiri militants. These terrorist gangs have forced some 250,000 Kashmiri Hindu Pandits
and approximately 50,000 Kashmiri Moslems who openly support India into becoming refugees in their own land. Moreover, in recent comments, former Prime Minister of Pakistan and current opposition leader in Parliament, Nawaz Sharif, threatened India with the use of nuclear weapons should India more
directly respond to the terrorism in Kashmir and the other provinces. Such tactics can only lead to greater insecurity in both India and Pakistan. Should the situation deteriorate, the consequences could be horrible. It is important that our government immediately impress upon the government of Pakistan that the subversion of other states through state-sponsored terrorism, as recent reports suggest, is unacceptable policy.
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REPORTS AND CONCERNS
Asia's Islamism engine
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/asias-islamism-engine/story-e6frg6v6-1111118217064
FOLLOWING the terror massacres in Mumbai, Pakistan may now be the single biggest state sponsor of terrorism, beyond even Iran. Yet it has never been listed by the US State Department as a state sponsor ofterrorism.
In 1998, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, the State Department's counter-terrorism co-ordinator recommended listing Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism. Then secretary of state Madeleine Albright decided against it, saying it would destroy US influence in Islamabad. And that has been the dilemma of Western policy towards Pakistan ever since.
India is now deciding whether to strike at a training base of Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Pakistan-based terrorist group involved in the Mumbai massacres. It may be that prudence will prevent India from conducting the strike. However, in law and morality, India would certainly be entitled to strike. The US has been conducting strikes across the Pakistani border to hit Taliban terrorists, who have been trying to kill NATO soldiers in Afghanistan. India would have the more urgent justification of protecting its civilians.
Every civilised person in the world has a duty to express maximum solidarity with India, which is what the Rudd Government has done and which is why US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in India.
Above all, the world must do nothing that rewards the terrorists for their actions.
US president-elect Barack Obama has expressed his absolute solidarity with India, but he has been a bit schizophrenic on Pakistan nonetheless. During the primaries, Obama said he would order military strikes on targets within Pakistan if he had information of high-value terrorists sheltering there and if the Pakistan Government could not or would not take action itself.
At first I thought this a little imprudent until the Bush administration started to do exactly the same thing. So, one tick to Obama's tough-minded realism.
However, he also has suggested appointing a special presidential negotiator on Kashmir. This is a very stupid and dangerous move indeed. In light of the Mumbai bombing it would be a pure political reward for terror outrages. The wretched message such a move would send would be: You murder enough civilians and we'll start making concessions.
As the epicentre of global terrorism shifts from the Middle East to South Asia, you can see the effort to transform the Kashmir dispute into the equivalent of the Palestinian dispute; that is, the fountainhead, all-purpose grievance can be used to explain, if not justify, every act of Islamist butchery and murder in the region.
But the history of Kashmir doesn't bear that out. Nor do negotiations on it offer any solution.
When India was partitioned in 1947, there were disputes over which bits should go to Muslim majority Pakistan and which should go to Hindu majority India. Kashmir's government, though it was a Muslim majority state, decided to go to India. Subsequently, a large chunk of its territory was taken by Pakistan, and the line between the territory Pakistan controls and that which India controls has been the effective border between India and Pakistan since. If anything, Pakistan should give back the territory it took. But during the intervening years the Pakistani government has constantly fuelled terrorism, separatism and insurgency in Kashmir. Islamabad thus has made it impossible for Kashmiri life to develop normally.
Undoubtedly, in response to this, at times India has been guilty of human rights abuses in Kashmir.
However, Kashmiris, like everyone else in India, enjoy Indian democracy, and state elections have recently been under way. If it were not for what are in effect constant acts of war by Pakistan, Kashmir could have settled into a fully normal life. Even with the constant Pakistani military intervention, India is still winning the allegiance of Kashmiris.
Pakistan's ruthless and amoral military establishment has always seen stoking the Kashmir dispute as in its interests. It keeps India off balance. At best it puts a cloud over the legitimacy of India as a modern, democratic, secular state.
It also confuses the distinction between India, which is a multiracial, multi-religious democracy with a booming economy, and Islamic Pakistan, which is a broken-backed state on the brink of failure and collapse. More than 10 per cent of India's population is Muslim, whereas few Hindus or Sikhs remain in Pakistan.
The only possible solution to Kashmir that Islamists would accept is all of Kashmir becoming Pakistani territory and some local Taliban-style government ruling day by day. The more Obama, or anyone else, tries to internationalise Kashmir, the more he is playing into the hands of terrorists.
We do not know for sure what degree of active involvement Pakistani authorities may have had in the Mumbai massacres.
The Pakistan Government denies all involvement and most senior Indians I speak to do not think the ineffectual Pakistani civilian Government was directly involved.
But it is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that an operation of such scale and sophistication, mounted by Pakistanis from within Pakistan, had no involvement from the Pakistani military or some element of its Inter Services Intelligence agency.
The ISI founded Lashkar-e-Toiba to prosecute its low-level war against India in Kashmir, just as the ISI founded the Taliban to ensure a government in Kabul sympathetic to Pakistani interests.
Lashkar-e-Toiba is notionally illegal in Pakistan but operates openly under another name. The ISI is asking us to believe that, having founded Lashkar-e-Toiba, it has no control or even knowledge of its biggest operations.
The parallel with the behaviour of Pakistan in the A.Q. Khan scandal is instructive. The Pakistanis expect us to believe they are a responsible nuclear power, yet have no responsibility or even knowledge when their chief nuclear scientist sells nuclear weapons technology to rogue regimes across the world, often using Pakistani military transports in the process.
The Pakistan Government has a long record of bad faith. In August it was involved in a terrorist bombing against the Indian embassy in Kabul. The Americans got this information, through their pervasive eavesdropping on electronic communications and passed it to the Indians.
There is no obvious path forward with Pakistan, which occupies that diabolical category of divided state, where part of the state fights terrorism and part of it enables and helps terrorism.
India, among others, is locked in a struggle with the pro-terrorist elements of the Pakistani state.
WARNINGS DIRECTLY FROM US OFFICIAL
http://archives.dawn.com/2008/12/06/top14.htm
ISLAMABAD, Dec 5 2008: The US Secretary of State, Dr Condoleezza Rice, is reported to have told Pakistan that there is 'irrefutable evidence' of involvement of elements in the country in the Mumbai attacks and that it needs to act urgently and effectively to avert a strong international response.
The information emerging after her departure indicates that in her meetings with President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani during her four-hour stay in Islamabad, she had told the them that Islamabad's options were quite limited.
Contrary to the formal statements issued by Pakistani authorities and her own statement at the Chaklala Airbase before her departure, sources said she "pushed the Pakistani leaders to take care of perpetrators, otherwise the US will act".
She is reported to have said that the response needed to be "effective and focused" and that India was thinking on similar lines.
Dr Rice had told the media at Chaklala that there had been no talk of military action and the discussions had focussed on ways of dealing with the problem of terrorism.
She hinted at having communicated to Pakistani leaders that the matter of dealing with the perpetrators was more urgent than they might have thought. She said: "There is urgency in getting to the bottom of it; there is urgency in bringing the perpetrators to justice; and there is urgency for using the information to disrupt and prevent further attacks."
Sources privy to the meetings said Pakistan had expressed its readiness to work jointly with India in investigating the incident, but had wanted such a cooperation to be comprehensive and also addressed its own concerns.
However, Ms Rice was reportedly not ready to listen to Pakistan's grievances about India's interference in Balochistan, the role of Indian consulates along the Afghan border in promoting instability in Pakistan and other such issues. Instead, she told Pakistani leaders that she would like to discuss only the issue at hand.