“War songs were played, commentators praised the military, and shouts of ‘God is greatest’ could be heard,” the Post wrote.
Pakistani intelligence has long been suspected as a state sponsor of terrorism. Indeed, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, there was a major US debate about terrorism. The dominant view that emerged was that terrorism was, more often than not, state-sponsored - a form of proxy war.
That remained the consensual perspective through the presidency of George H. W. Bush. Shortly after Bill Clinton became president, however, with the February 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center, the nature of terrorism was said to have changed radically. There was supposed to be a new kind of terrorism that did not involve states but consisted of “loose networks” of Islamic extremists.
Whether that was really true or whether Clinton sought to avoid the challenge of responding to a state-sponsored attack on America, there were always doubts about Pakistan.
“In the 1980s,” Pakistan “nurtured radical Sunni militant groups as terrorist proxies against India over the control of Kashmir,” Washington-based scholar, Ahmed Majidyar wrote, as he explained that JeM—the same group targeted by India on Tuesday—had been involved in the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.
Under US pressure then, Pakistan arrested a large number of militants, including JeM’s leader, Masood Azhar. But “Pakistani jails have revolving doors,” Majidyar noted, and Azhar was soon free.
Indeed, France, which will assume the presidency of the UN Security Council on March 1, has said that it will press to add Azhar to the UN’s list of global terrorists, according to Indian media. Previous efforts have been blocked by China.
Like India, Afghanistan has long complained of Pakistani support for terrorists. After the 9/11 attacks, the US-led coalition quickly drove the Taliban from power but ended up fighting a prolonged insurgency. Afghan President Hamid Karzai repeatedly said that the real problem was Pakistan’s backing for the Taliban—and not so much the Taliban themselves, who would not be a serious threat, were it not for Pakistani support.
In 2017, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, Carlotta Gall, published a book about the Afghan war, entitled, The Wrong Enemy, which made the same argument.
The Trump administration appears to have largely embraced that perspective. It has been much tougher than its post 9/11 predecessors—the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama—on Pakistani support for terrorism.
“The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years,” President Donald Trump stated in his first tweet of 2018.