The senior Democrat of the powerful Armed Services Committee has criticized the Obama administration’s State Department for failing to designate a deadly insurgency group operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a foreign terrorist organization and is challenging Pakistan to do its part to help bring an end to the growing criminal clan. “I have repeatedly written to Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton to press her to have the Haqqani group added to the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, to make more tools available to our government agencies to sanction this organization,” Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, of Michigan, said in an email exchange with The Washington Examiner. “This step is long overdue and I hope the State Department will move quickly to designate the Haqqanis a Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

Levin, who traveled to Kabul last week with Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, said the Pakistani government’s tolerance of the Haqqani network, which is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. and Afghan forces, is “unconscionable.” The State Department’s failure to designate the group a terrorist organization is making it difficult for the intelligence community to use all available tactics to defeat them, he said.