Till now the view was the US had an Afghanistan problem to deal with, for which Pakistan’s help was vital. This helped General Musharraf to milk the US for eleven billion dollars over eight years without contributing significantly to the solution of Afghanistan issue. In fact the Pakistani army aggravated the problem by enabling the Taliban to expand and providing a safe haven for al Qaeda. Now the US is changing focus, and viewing Pakistan as the central problem.

Hadley now asserts that unless the Pakistan problem is solved, Afghanistan cannot be effectively addressed. He also highlighted the parlous state of Pakistani economy and the support that US extended to enable Pakistan to obtain IMF help.

Coming back to terrorism against India — while Pakistan under US pressure may accept that the terrorists originated from Pakistan, they are not likely to accept any links with the ISI. As in the A.Q.Khan case, they will try to delink the terrorists and their handlers, or even stage a trial as they did in the Omar Sheikh case, for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. It is extremely unlikely the terrorists’ handlers will be handed over to India.

In the history of state-sponsored terrorism there has been only one case of a nation surrendering its terrorists and paying compensation to the relatives of victims. That was Libya in respect of the Lockerbie airliner bombing case. But that came about after more than a decade of stalling, through which the international community kept up ceaseless economic pressure. Though Libya had oil earnings it succumbed, and Pakistan is far more vulnerable to such pressure than Libya was.

... contd.