Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was advised to carefully balance U.S. measures to get Islamabad to focus on al-Qaeda terrorists with other initiatives to get Pakistan to shift its strategic attention away from India.
The nearly 3,000 pages of Ms. Clinton’s private-account e-mails released to the public late on Tuesday contained one written on October 3, 2009 to the Secretary by Samuel Richard “Sandy” Berger, former U.S. National Security Adviser for President Bill Clinton during 1997-2001, in which the author asked, “Are there measures that the Indians could take that would reduce Pakistani anxieties about the Indian front and thus better enable them to focus on threats to the East, including both AQ and anti-Indian militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba?”
India-Pak. relations He particularly cited the possibility of India initiating confidence-building measures such as “information sharing on troop movements that would both reduce uncertainty and support a Pakistani public narrative for a shift in emphasis from India to the militancy…”
The conversation between Mr. Berger and Ms. Clinton gives insight into the apparent frustration of the U.S. administration over the lack of sufficient leverage or influence over Pakistani policies, particularly in the military realm.
At one point in the e-mail, Mr. Berger alluded to the Pakistanis’ variable response to tackling terror groups linked to official structures, relative to those who were not “embedded” in the state in any way.
Cultivating terrorists In this regard he wrote, “In particular, they seem to be more reluctant to target AQ where it is nestled with groups they want to cultivate in the event we ‘leave’ Afghanistan and they need influence ther.”
Mr. Berger also noted that depending on the U.S. success with intelligence-gathering, it could “go after bank accounts, travel and other reachable assets of individual Pakistani officers,” and this may raise the stakes for those supporting the militants without creating an ‘inordinate backlash’.”
While Mr. Berger told Ms. Clinton that giving Pakistan more control over the use of Kerry-Lugar funds could strengthen Washington’s hand in “pressing” for action al-Qaida, he admitted, “Blunter measures of coercion, like conditioning our assistance, are more likely to be counterproductive.”
