China builds military drones that evade missiles US lawmaker urges ‘radical reset’ of ties with Pakistan
China’s largest missile maker is developing military drones with stealth abilities that can evade anti-aircraft weapons, the official China Daily said on Thursday, in another advance for its ambitious military modernisation programme. REUTERS
A leading Republican lawmaker has called for a “radical reset” of United States’ ties with Pakistan and urged new congressional hearings, joining a mounting demand for harsh measures to discipline an “appalling ally” and “quasi-adversary”.
“Something must change in our dealings with a terroristsupporting, irresponsible nuclear-weapons state, and it must change soon,” Congressman Ted Poe, who heads the House of Representatives’ subcommittee on terrorism and non-proliferation, wrote in an op-ed authored jointly with James Clad, a former Pentagon official, in National Interest magazine on Wednesday. “Acquiescing in the current trends is not an option,” they added.
Saying “it’s time that the US sets, unilaterally, the limits of its indulgence”, the authors have made three main suggestions: One, “don’t let the next crisis in South or Southwest Asia deflect our focus (from Pakistan).”
Two, “don’t rush to shore up Pakistan’s balance of payments via the IMF or other intermediaries, as we’ve done in the past”, and, three, “Let China pay that, if the Pakistanis wish to mortgage their future in that way.”
At a closed-door briefing for 45 congressional staff on Tuesday — called The Appalling Ally — Poe asked for “a new series of Pakistan-focused hearings on Capitol Hill in upcoming months”, saying, “The problem cannot be ducked any longer.”
The new Congress may just have picked up from where the last one left off, with lawmakers of both chambers frequently calling Pakistan a “duplicitous ally” and a “Frenemy” and asked for it to be named a state sponsor of terrorism.
The op-ed and the hearing come just weeks after a bipartisan group of South Asia experts urged the Trump administration to be “ready to adopt tougher measures toward Islamabad”, even the threat of declaring it state sponsor of terrorism.
Since May 2011, when Osama bin Laden was found and killed in a house just miles from Pakistan’s elite military school in Abbottabad, the one-time ally has been in a precipitous fall in US eyes, as a haven for all hues of terrorists.
Lawmakers killed a proposal by the Obama administration in 2016 to sell Pakistan new F-16 fighter jets over Islamabad’s failure to act against terrorists form tis soil, specially the Haqqani Network that is battling US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan.
They have also sought to tie up US financial assistance to Pakistan’s counter-insurgency measures, but as Poe and Clad argued, “Pakistan has become a quasiadversary, receiving hundreds of billions through the years in direct and indirect US support, a strange hostage-like arrangement in which we pay Islamabad to do what it should be doing anyway…”