WASHINGTON: Pakistan's ambassador to the United States Jalil Abbas Jilani lied brazenly to Americans on the weekend about ''targeting all terrorists without any discrimination'' despite public appearances in Pakistan of UN and US-designated terrorists, amid repeated assertions by the
Obama administration and US lawmakers that Islamabad is not fulfilling its commitments to stop fostering terrorism.
Not censure by several American Senators and Congressmen for its continued support for terrorism nor open threats to US and India from extremists such as Hafiz Saeed, a UN-designated terrorist, tempered Jilani's insistence that allegations of Pakistan supporting militants are ''baseless and unfounded.''
Typical of serial denials that Pakistan did not undertake nuclear proliferation, did not infiltrate in Kargil, and there was no way Osama bin Laden could be in Pakistan (all three bluffs called), Jilani, who expelled from India in 2003 for funneling money to Hurriyat leaders, told Voice of America Pakistan is ''fighting a battle against the proxies of Cold War,'' laying the blame for Pakistan's policies at the doorstep of superpowers.
Jilani's assertion came even as a petition to the White House seeking to
declare Pakistan a terrorist state gathered more than 600,000 signatures, and US lawmakers continued to castigate Islamabad, some of them openly supporting India's surgical strike inside Pakistan.
The State Department meanwhile continued to counsel restraint, hamstrung by Washington's diminishing dependence on Pakistan for access to its residual presence in Afghanistan.
Pakistan's continued depredations in Afghanistan aimed at undermining the US and Indian efforts to stabilize the situation came under renewed focus after a journalist who has long reported on the subject returned to the area.
Carlotta Gall, who by her own account has been beaten up by ISI goons for exposing Pakistan's support for terror proxies, reported over the weekend that the ''Pakistani military is ever more brazen in its support for the insurgents, even flying in retired military officers to train the Taliban by chartered helicopter.''
''Watching so many deadly attacks continue over the years with little done to prevent them at their source has been one of my hardest experiences as a reporter. And it is increasingly difficult to answer Afghans when they wonder how America could have been so blind or careless to ignore Pakistan's role in sponsoring terrorism,'' Gall wrote.
Author of The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014, Gall has long said the ISI was hiding and protecting Osama bin Laden and his family after 9/11.
''Despite years of denials from Pakistan, it is now widely understood that the Taliban has all this time been mentored and equipped by the Pakistani intelligence agency. Yet President Obama has failed, as did his predecessor, President George W. Bush, to end Pakistan's long flirtation with Al Qaeda and its brand of terrorism,'' Gall wrote in the New York Times over the weekend.
Indeed, the Obama administration continues to coddle Pakistan despite growing public and Congressional pressure, in the hope that the country can be reformed. US officials have told ToI that there have been several ''tough conversations" with Islamabad lately, but the broad impression that one gets is Washington just wants to kick the can down the road for a few months and allow the next administration to deal with the problem.
Pakistan's finance minister Ishaq Dar is slated to visit Washington DC later this week with more demands for assistance from a country that has acquired a reputation as a ''rentier state.''
In one scheduled talk at a Washington DC think-tank, Pakistan has positioned itself as a ''Rising Emerging Market'' even though its principal sources of revenue -- exports and remittances -- have both contracted over the past year.
