Action against terrorists should begin in Pakistan: US experts
Washington |Tuesday, 2010 7:35:06 PM IST
 

With the US intelligence community warning of a new terrorist attack in the next six months, two leading security experts suggest that preventive action should begin in Pakistan that remains the locus of terrorism.

Bruce Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer who advised President Barack Obama on his Afghanistan Pakistan strategy said that for several years after 2002, Al Qaeda seemed fixated on conducting another mass-casualty attack in the US even more horrifying than 9/11.

"Now, perhaps because of the pressure we are putting on the Al Qaeda core in Pakistan, the bar has apparently been lowered," Riedel, currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, wrote in the The Daily Beast, an American news reporting

and opinion website.

"So if Al Qaeda is now broadening the scope of its attacks, we must adjust to the change and broaden our counter measures," he said, calling for more diplomatic efforts to persuade all US allies in the war with Al Qaeda to pre-empt terror with take-downs of jihadist cells.

According to Riedel, the US needs to aggressively disrupt and take down not just the Al Qaeda core in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but step up the pressure on Al Qaeda cells in Yemen, the Maghreb, Indonesia, Iraq, and on the group's allies like Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Pakistani Taliban that also operate in the West.

Daniel L. Byman, another senior fellow at Brookings, however, argued that "although groups like Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula are rightly claiming the attention of US national security officials, Pakistan remains the locus of terrorist activity and that any solutions have to begin there".

"In the last five years, the Al Qaeda core has reconstituted itself in Pakistan, using it as a base to rebuild its forces and plan terrorist attacks," he wrote in The Daily Beast.

Drone strikes on militants disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership and force the organisation to keep its head down. But by themselves they are not enough, Byman said, suggesting: "Pakistan must reclaim the territory Al Qaeda and like-minded groups have seized as their sanctuary."

"Pakistani leaders, unfortunately, have made an art form of stepping up cooperation when problems are in the headlines, only to revert to form when US attention shifts elsewhere," he suggested.

Thus the Obama administration must redouble pressure on Pakistan to restart its stalled military offensive against militants in border areas near Afghanistan and otherwise take aggressive action against the militant presence in the country, Byman argued.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)

ak/mj

( 439 Words)

2010-02-09-17:53:09 (IANS)

 

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