Pakistan used terror as a hedge against India: Hillary Clinton

[smartindian]

WASHINGTON: Islamabad used to support terror outfits as a hedge against India and an unfriendly Afghan regime, so that the two neighbours of Pakistan do not undermine it, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said.

"They (Pakistan) have in the past hedged against both India and an unfriendly regime in Afghanistan by supporting groups that will be their proxies in trying to prevent either India or an unfriendly Afghan Government from undermining their position," she said.

Clinton said now things are "changing", but she cannot confirm whether Pakistan has stopped the use of terror against India and Afghanistan.

"That is changing... Now, I cannot sit here and tell you that it has changed, but that is changing," she told ABC News in an interview, the transcripts of which was released by the state department.

Clinton accepted that US had created certain radical outfits and supported terrorists like Osama bin Laden to fight against the erstwhile Soviet Union, but that backing has boomeranged.

"Part of what we are fighting against right now, the United States created. We created the Mujahidin force against the Soviet Union (in Afghanistan). We trained them, we equipped them, we funded them, including somebody named Osama bin Laden.

"And it didn't work out so well for us," she said. The secretary of the state also said Pakistan is paying a "big price" for supporting US war against terror groups in their own national interest.

"But I think it is important to note that as they have made these adjustments in their own assessment of their national interests, they're paying a big price for it," Clinton said.

"And it's not an easy calculation for them to make. But we are making progress (in Afghanistan). We have a long way to go and we can't be impatient...Well, the headlines are bad. We're going home. We cannot do that," she said.

Appearing on the same ABC show, secretary of defence Robert Gates said Pakistan has withdrawn an equivalent of about six divisions of its army from the Indian border and moved them.

"And they are attacking the Taliban. They're attacking the Taliban -- Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, and safe havens that are a problem for us," Gates said.

"But the other piece of this, we face in both countries what they call a trust deficit, and it is because they believe we have walked away from them in the past at the toughest moments of their history.

"You can't recreate that (trust) in a heartbeat. You can't recreate that in a year or two. They both worry that once we solve the problem in Afghanistan, or if we don't solve it, that either way, we will leave and leave whatever remains in their hands to deal with," he added.

Read more: Pakistan used terror as a hedge against India: Hillary Clinton - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...Clinton/articleshow/6918726.cms#ixzz15AU2oXa6


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...India-Hillary-Clinton/articleshow/6918726.cms

 

[ajtr]

Pakistan divides U.S. and India-Selig Harrison​

Washington should stop providing Islamabad with weaponry that can be used against India and take a realistic view of the reasons for Indian-Pakistani tensions.

Obama Mission: Billions to Pakistan, Billions From India" This screaming headline in the Times of India ahead of President Obama's visit to New Delhi explains why a quiet crisis is developing in what seems, on the surface, to be an increasingly promising relationship between the world's two largest democracies.

But the full potential of U.S.-Indian cooperation, including naval cooperation in the face of an increasingly ambitious China, will not be realized until Washington stops providing Islamabad with weaponry that can be used against India and takes a realistic view of the reasons for Indian-Pakistani tensions.
Since 9/11, the U.S. has showered $13.5 billion in military hardware on Islamabad, and it pledged another $2 billion last month. The Pentagon justifies this buildup in the name of combating terrorism. But the big-ticket items have all strengthened Pakistani air and naval capabilities needed for potential combat with India, not for counterinsurgency mountain warfare against the Taliban.

The message from Islamabad is that Pakistan's "insecurity" in the face of Indian power explains why it aids the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that a settlement over the disputed Kashmir region would lead Pakistan to abandon support for Islamist forces. Bob Woodward's book, "Obama's Wars," shows in detail that the U.S. intelligence community has accepted this argument uncritically and that it has impressed the president.
But the reason Pakistan supports the Taliban is that it wants to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan with its own surrogates. This objective would not be altered by a Kashmir settlement.

More important, the underlying reason for Pakistan's feelings of insecurity is that it is an artificial entity hastily patched together by the British Raj in the 1947 partition.The Muslim League movement that campaigned in then-undivided India to create Pakistan had limited mass support in the areas that were to constitute the new state. Recent historical studies have conclusively established that Pakistan came into being primarily because league leaders had agreed to give Britain military bases there, while India's Jawaharlal Nehru had declared his intention to pursue a nonaligned foreign policy.No state had ever combined the four incompatible ethnic regions that make up Pakistan today, encompassing the dominant Punjabi and large Baluchi, Pashtun and Sindhi minorities, each with their own ancestral territory. The minorities had fought throughout history to resist domination by the Punjabi, but it was a Punjabi-dominated army that took over the new state.

The U.S. has held Pakistan together for the last half-century by pouring billions in military aid into a series of military dictatorships, initially in return for intelligence-monitoring facilities to spy on Soviet missile sites, later for helping to aid the Afghan resistance and, since 2001, to compensate for cooperation in the "war on terror."

Apart from their dominant position in real estate, current and retired generals run army-linked business conglomerates with net assets totaling $38 billion.

Zardari is often dismissed as a corrupt playboy incapable of governing, and he has indeed been a weak administrator. But he has demonstrated surprising courage and consistency in seeking to downgrade the Kashmir issue and to jump-start trade with India as the key to easing Indian-Pakistani tensions.

This reversed Pakistan's policy of deliberate ambiguity on the first use of nuclear weapons and outraged military leaders. Was this the last straw for the army? Was the Mumbai attack instigated by Islamist hard-liners to wreck Zardari's peace campaign, as one of his closest advisors suggested to me? In any case, the army has largely succeeded in silencing him.

To demonstrate sensitivity to Indian concerns about Pakistan, Obama should make clear that the United States accepts the findings of an Indian intelligence probe of the Mumbai attack.