WASHINGTON: The presence of Al Qaeda in the tribal areas and the fear that the insurgents may be seeking nuclear weapons made Pakistan the focus of America’s new war strategy, senior US officials told a Senate panel on Thursday.
‘The Taliban regained momentum in Afghanistan and the extremist threat grew in Pakistan, a country … with 175 million people, a nuclear arsenal, and more than its share of challenges,’ Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
‘So it was against this backdrop that the president called for this careful, thorough review of our strategy.’
Chairman of the committee Senator John Kerry backed her, saying that ‘what happens in Pakistan ... will do more to determine the outcome in Afghanistan than any increase in troops or shift in strategy’.
Opening a hearing on Obama’s Afghan strategy, Senator Kerry said that it was the ‘presence of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, its direct ties to and support from the Taliban in Afghanistan and the perils of an unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan that drive our mission.’
Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the committee, asked Secretary Clinton, Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to explain how the new strategy would promote a stronger alliance with Pakistan and enable them to uproot Al Qaeda safe havens from Fata.
He warned that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons made it a riskier landscape than Afghanistan.
US intelligence officials claim that only about 100 Al Qaeda operatives remain in Afghanistan and that while they have great influence over the larger Taliban network, Al Qaeda’s base has moved to Pakistan.
‘It is not clear how any expanded military effort in Afghanistan addresses the problem of Taliban and Al Qaeda safe havens across the border in Pakistan,’ asked Senator Lugar.
‘If these safe havens persist, any strategy in Afghanistan will be substantially incomplete.’
Admiral Mullen assured Senator Lugar that Pakistan was a ‘critical part’ of the three-month strategy-drafting process and agreed that the link between the trajectory of both countries was ‘almost absolute’.
‘There was an enormous amount of time spent on Pakistan,’ he said, adding that a ‘long-term partnership’ was needed with the Pakistan government.
‘The outcome in Afghanistan bears directly on Pakistan’s future.’ The relationship between Al Qaeda and various insurgent and terrorist networks in Fata was also endorsed by Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen.
Secretary Clinton described these groups as a syndicate headed by Al Qaeda. ‘At the head of the table’, like a ‘Mafia family’, sat Al Qaeda. And that means, she told the Senate panel, that Al Qaeda retained a capability to export terrorism to ‘Yemen, Somalia or, indeed, Denver’.
This was a reference to the recently arrested Najibullah Zazi, who allegedly was trained in Fata for setting up Al Qaeda cells in the United States, a charge he denies. ‘This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat,’ President Obama said in his speech at West Point.
‘In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror.’
'The reality,’ Gates told the panel, ‘is that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, place high value on their affiliation with Al Qaeda on that border (Fata) and there is ample intelligence’ of others forming and seeking to reach back to the capabilities of Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.
Separately, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, told an audience in Washington on Thursday that there was a significant risk that ‘recent arrests’ in the US showed that terrorists had been ‘sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit more acts of terror’.
She said that Zazi’s connections to Al Qaeda’s senior leadership in that region were 'at most one step removed'.....LINK
Tags: af-pak,us pakistan relations
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