Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen led the charge. She is the chairperson of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and she did not mince her words. She said that the Afghan Taliban operate freely here and that Pakistan refuses to take action against those groups which are inside its borders and this is a “direct contributor to the Taliban success”. Ambassador Olson came to our defence saying that we were at a strategic crossroads and had made progress in addressing counterterrorism priorities; but there was still room for improvement, in particular addressing “more robustly” those groups that threaten Afghanistan, a poorly-veiled reference to the Haqqani group. Any local observer of events since the inception of the National Action Plan in the wake of the Army Public School massacre in 2014 cannot but see what some of our critics are driving at. There has not been an equitable fight against extremism and terrorism, south Punjab remains largely untouched with its network of extremist madrassas and banned groups that operate freely. It is realities such as this that stoke the antipathy of Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen and others of her ilk, and which feeds through to more generalised perceptions in the wider American public. If Pakistan is to effectively push back against the jibes of an unsympathetic world, then it needs to stop shooting itself in the foot.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 30th, 2016.
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