U.S. lawmakers, citing this month’s deadly terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., complained Wednesday that Pakistan still isn’t doing enough to disrupt the extremist networks that bred one of the killers.
News reports indicate that Tashfeen Malik, who with her husband Syed Farook, killed 14 people at a holiday party on Dec. 2, grew up in an Islamist extremist environment, both in Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia, where she lived for a time and where the couple first met. Though the attack has generated a wave of soul-searching in Pakistan about the country’s problem with Islamist militants, U.S. lawmakers say the government needs to do more to solve it.
“We want a strong partnership with the country but a new policy is long overdue,” said House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, a Republican whose southern California district is near San Bernardino.
Lawmakers raised the possibility of a cut in U.S. aid to Pakistan, which has amounted to about $30 billion since the Sept. 11 attacks, and also travel and financial sanctions against Pakistani officials who continue to associate with known terrorist groups.
But Richard Olson, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, argued against punitive measures, saying the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is moving in the right direction, especially in the shock following the massacre of 144 students and teachers by the Taliban in an army-run school in Peshawar a year ago.
“Pakistan is becoming a more constructive actor in the region,” Olson said, but noted that more needs to be done against extremist groups seen as a threat to the country’s neighbors, such as Afghanistan and India.
“We continue to press Pakistan to target all militant groups that have safe haven in Pakistan, including the Taliban, the Haqqani network and Lashkar-e-Taiba,” Olson said.
No country has suffered more from Islamist extremist terrorism than Pakistan, even though at least 95 percent of its 182 million people are Muslim. Among the reasons cited by analysts who have studied the issue is the government’s decades-long flirtation with some extremist groups as a hedge against India and to retain Islamabad’s influence in Afghanistan.
Almost 21,000 civilians and more than 6,300 security personnel have died in terrorist violence in that country since 2003.
Though officials in Islamabad declared they would no longer distinguish between “good” jihadis and “bad” jihadis after the Peshawar school massacre and intensified a military operation to root out extremists from tribal areas near the Afghan border, skepticism remains on Capitol Hill about whether Pakistan can be trusted to effectively stem the problem.
“To say that there are serious doubts is an understatement on Pakistan’s credibility,” Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, said.
Pakistani military spokesman Lt. Gen. Asim Bajwa, in a series of tweets, said the military operation had achieved a “phenomenal success,” with the last pockets of resistance along the Afghan border being cleared.
“Terrorists’ backbone broken. Main infrastructure dismantled. Nexus with sleeper cells largely disrupted,” he said, noting that 488 troops had been killed and 1,914 injured in the 18-month operation.
But Islamabad has not done as well in dealing with the political dimension of the issue — the support for extremism that permeates Pakistani society. Royce said Pakistani officials have dragged their feet in shutting down madrasas funded by Persian Gulf Arab money that promote radical Islamist ideologies such as the Deobandi school Malik attended.
In a recent Pew survey about attitudes toward the Islamic State, only 28 percent of Pakistanis had a negative view of the extremist group. Though only 9 percent had a favorable view of the group, nearly two-thirds, 62 percent, weren’t sure.
“Extremist views have now become mainstream” after decades of indoctrination and glorification of such views, wrote Salman Masood, Pakistan correspondent for the New York Times, in an op-ed for The Nation daily.
“The fight against terror would remain unsuccessful if there is selective application of law and selective action against militants of different stripes and colours,” he wrote. “It would also remain ineffective if militants and their sympathisers are tolerated, and inadvertently allowed to expand their tentacles.”
