Tillerson reiterates stance in Pakistan
Stop aiding, funding terrorists, he says
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stopped in Islamabad on his way to New Delhi on Tuesday to deliver what he hoped would be a sobering message to Pakistan: Stop funding or providing shelter to terrorist groups.
It is a message the United States has been giving the Pakistanis in various forms since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and it is one the Pakistanis have by turns harkened to, bristled at and shrugged off — sometimes in the same meeting — for years.
In tackling the dysfunctional relationship between the United States and Pakistan, President Donald Trump’s administration is finding that it is not unlike some difficult marriages: all but impossible to fix but also impossible to end.
There were few signs Tuesday that this 16-year-old dynamic had changed.
Tillerson met with three of Pakistan’s top leaders at the prime minister’s residence in Islamabad: Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi; the foreign minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif; and the army’s chief of staff, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa.
At a formal greeting before a portrait of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who is considered the father of Pakistan, Tillerson began with reassurances.
“Pakistan is important, as you know, regionally to the U.S. security relationships and so important regionally to our joint goals of providing peace and security to the region and providing opportunity for a greater economic relationship as well,” he said.
Abbasi, wearing a traditional white kurta next to Tillerson’s dark suit, responded cheerfully but pointedly.
“The U.S. can rest assured that we are strategic partners in the war against terror and that today Pakistan is fighting the largest war in the world against terror,” he said.
The United States believes that Pakistan has for years supported terrorist groups, like the Haqqani network, that attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan, undermining the 16-year effort to defeat the Taliban. But for just as long, the United States has relied on Pakistani air and land routes to supply both U.S. and Afghan forces.
Without Pakistan, the United States would not be able to keep troops in Afghanistan — but it also might not need to, some U.S. observers suggest.
“What do you do when your allies are part of the problem?” asked Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University. “The desire to turn our backs on these people is there, but then you worry that terrorists will have more operational freedom and it will cost you more in the long run.”
In public, the Pakistanis say they have killed more terrorists at greater cost in lives lost than any other nation. In private, they say they must hedge their bets against the inevitable day when U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.
In the days leading up to Tillerson’s visit, the United States conducted a flurry of airstrikes along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, fulfilling Trump’s promise in August to intensify attacks against the Taliban and Haqqani network, which, while working out of Pakistan, has supplied suicide bombers in Afghanistan since 2005.
Local news media outlets reported more than a dozen missile strikes that killed scores of Haqqani fighters. The strikes, many of them in Pakistani territory, are deeply irritating to Pakistan, which considers them a threat to its sovereignty.