Washington: Despite decades of evidence linking Pakistan to major terrorist attacks against Americans – from the 1993 CIA headquarters shooting and World Trade Centre bombing to Osama bin Laden’s sanctuary in Abbottabad – the United States continues its cycle of aid, dialogue, and engagement with Islamabad, a report cited on Friday.
According to the report in European Times, although Pakistan sat at the core of almost every major jihadist network that has killed or attempted to kill Americans, Washington continues to treat Islamabad as a “strategic necessity”, convening new dialogues despite a troubled past.
It said the US and Pakistan held another Counterterrorism Dialogue in Islamabad on August 12, committing cooperation against “evolving threats”, a move echoing a familiar pattern of aid and engagement followed by bloodshed that the US has experienced before.
The report asserted that even after 24 years since the September 11 attacks, the record for Pakistan remains unchanged.
“The pattern deepened after 9/11. In 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi, an atrocity linked in court filings to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, with al‑Qaeda figure Khalid Sheikh Mohammed later claiming responsibility. In 1997, four American oil workers were gunned down in Karachi; the anti‑Shia Pakistani group Lashkar‑e‑Jhangvi claimed the attack, according to the United Nations sanctions listing. In 2008, Lashkar‑e‑Taiba’s three‑day assault on Mumbai killed 166, including six Americans, an attack planned by militants trained in Pakistan,” the report detailed.
The reports indicated that parts of Pakistan’s security apparatus have been accused of collusion with terrorist proxies. America’s top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, in 2011, told the US Senate that the Haqqani Network, responsible for some of the deadliest attacks on Americans in Afghanistan, operated as a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
“Declassified records later suggested a Pakistani intelligence officer paid $200,000 to facilitate the 2009 suicide bombing at the CIA’s Camp Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan, which killed seven Agency personnel, Pakistan denied the allegation, but the document underscored why US trust remains brittle,” the report noted.
It added that while Pakistan continues to hold strategic significance for Washington, the continuous pattern of militant networks operating from Pakistani soil, sometimes with apparent state backing, raises fundamental questions about whether conventional diplomatic approaches can effectively tackle the long-standing security challenge.
“Until Pakistan dismantles the militant infrastructure that has repeatedly facilitated attacks on American interests, the cycle of cooperation followed by bloodshed is likely to continue, making genuine counterterrorism progress difficult to achieve,” the report stressed.
(IANS)
