Pakistan and state-sponsored terrorism

Pakistan has long been accused by its neighbours India and Afghanistan, and western nations like the United States, and the United Kingdom of its involvement in terrorist activities in the region and beyond. Pakistan's tribal region along the border of Afghanistan has been claimed to be a "haven for terrorists" by western media and the United States Defense Secretary. According to an analysis published by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution in 2008, Pakistan was, "with the possible exception of Iran, perhaps the world’s most active sponsor of terrorist groups... aiding groups that pose a direct threat to the United States."Daniel Byman, an author, also wrote that, "Pakistan is probably 2008's most active sponsor of terrorism".

Until Pakistan became a key ally in the War on Terrorism, the US Secretary of State included Pakistan on the 1993 list of countries which repeatedly provide support for acts of international terrorism. In fact, many consider that Pakistan has been playing both sides in the fight against terror, on the one hand, demostrating to help curtail terrorist activities while on the other, stoking it. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid and author Ted Galen Carpenter have accused Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of providing help to the Taliban and rebels in Kashmir.

Author Gordon Thomas states that whilst aiding in the capture of Al Qaeda members, Pakistan "still sponsored terrorist groups in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, funding, training and arming them in their war of attrition against India". Journalist Stephen Schwartz notes that several terrorist and criminal groups are "backed by senior officers in the Pakistani army, the country's ISI intelligence establishment and other armed bodies of the state". According to Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, "Without the active support of the government in Islamabad, it is doubtful whether the Taliban could ever have come to power in Afghanistan. Pakistani authorities helped fund the militia and equip it with military hardware during the mid-1990s when the Taliban was merely one of several competing factions in Afghanistan’s civil war. Only when the United States exerted enormous diplomatic pressure after the Sept. 11 attacks did Islamabad begin to sever its political and financial ties with the Taliban. Even now it is not certain that key members of Pakistan’s intelligence service have repudiated their Taliban clients.

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Wikipedia