One cannot help but wish that Kerry could conceive the real picture of the threat that the US is leaving behind.
JUBAIL, SAUDI ARABIA: If someone has to believe what John Kerry informed the press the other day during his Pakistan visit, then they better look for a better term other than ‘optimistic’. Kerry bluntly stated that as the US has eliminated most of the militant threat from Pakistan’s tribal areas, drone strikes could end “very, very soon”. We don’t know whether he was serious or uninformed while delivering such an irresponsible statement.
Who says that threats from the groups holed up in the tribal areas have subsided? On the contrary, they have increased manifold. The threat is not only very much there, but has also changed into a monstrous tree of cannibalised branches, which cover south and Central Asia. Who can deny the nexus of al Qaeda with the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Haqqani network, extremist movements in Uzbekistan and China, etc.? In Pakistan, it is not only the tribal areas which are infested with terrorists. The authorities are unable to imprison, try and sentence high profile terrorists as they get released from courts that are under threat, or through jailbreaks, or in the worst case scenario, they operate their terrorist networks from their prison cells, thanks to the wide availability of mobile phones and other communication tools. One cannot help but wish that Kerry could conceive the real picture of the threat that the US is leaving behind.
Masood Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, August 6th, 2013.
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