Earlier this month, the White House announced a decision to suspend all military aid to Pakistan—such aid has amounted to billions of dollars—for its active support for the Taliban and affiliates of al-Qaeda. The editors of the Weekly Standard applaud the decision:
Pakistan zealously backs our enemies even as it takes our money. . . . Pakistan supplies the Taliban with arms and with territory for training camps. We know this because Taliban commanders have freely said so. Pakistan arms the al-Qaeda-affiliated Haqqani network, responsible for many deadly attacks in Afghanistan. Although the Haqqani headquarters in Waziristan [an area of Pakistan that borders on Afghanistan] is well known, and although the Pakistani military has conducted antiterrorist operations there many times, the group remains unmolested. . . .
Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for appalling terrorist attacks in both India and Afghanistan, openly operates recruitment centers throughout Pakistan. It was Lashkar-e-Taiba that carried out the 2008 suicide attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people over the course of three days, [including a Chabad rabbi and his pregnant wife]. As for al-Qaeda itself, it’s no coincidence that Osama bin Laden’s compound was in Abbottabad—the home of Pakistan’s military academy. . . .
But withholding money, however sensible, isn’t enough. We will have to impose other and more severe penalties. This begins with naming and sanctioning Pakistani government officials and entities who support jihadist groups. Depending on the behavior of the Pakistani government, it might include a more fundamental change: formally designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism. . . .
Such a step might lead Pakistan to deny the United States use of its territory for Afghan operations, which will require our forces to use the Russian-influenced territories to the north as bases of operation. But the region will not cease to be the globe’s jihadism nerve center until Pakistan ceases to see [jihadism] as a tool of the state. Just as our weakness and naïveté encouraged the country flagrantly to disregard American interests in the first place, a progressively tougher stance toward Pakistan’s terrorism backers will produce geopolitical benefits elsewhere, We may not be able to pry Pakistan from its paranoid dependency on jihadism, but we don’t have to fund it, either.
Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/a-pakistan-crackdown/article/2011123