Hillary was advised to take action on pro-al-Qaeda Pak. army leaders

Advice given by Samuel Richard "Sandy" Berger, who served as the U.S. National Security Adviser for President Bill Clinton from March 14, 1997, until January 20, 2001

FILE - In this Jan. 23, 2014, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly September attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The State Department plans to make about 3,000 pages of Hillary Rodham Clinton's correspondence publically available on Tuesday evening. The release comes as part of a court mandate that the agency release batches of Clinton's email correspondence from her time as secretary of state every 30 days starting June 30. The goal is for the department to publicly unveil 55,000 pages of her emails by Jan. 29, 2016. They were sent from the personal email address that Clinton used when she was secretary. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Hillary Clinton was advised to quietly take action against Pakistani military leaders who gave support to the al-Qaeda and its affiliates, an e-mail sent to her when she was Secretary of State shows.

Such an advice was given to Ms. Clinton by Samuel Richard “Sandy” Berger, who served as the United States National Security Adviser for President Bill Clinton from March 14, 1997, until January 20, 2001, as per the e-mail dated October 3, 2009, declassified by the State Department on Tuesday.

A tranche of e-mails of Ms. Clinton when she was Secretary of State was released late on Tuesday night.

‘Coercive measures effective’

“I believe that coercive measures are more likely to be effective if they are targeted against military leaders who give support to AQ [al—Qaeda] and its allies,” Mr. Berger said in his email to Ms. Clinton, at her request.

“Assuming we have adequate intelligence, we can go after bank accounts, travel and other reachable assets of individual Pakistani officers, raising the stakes for those supporting the militants without creating an inordinate backlash,” Mr. Berger said.

“Blunter measures of coercion, like conditioning our assistance, are more likely to be counterproductive. Given the level of distrust for us among the Pakistani people, they would see this as another sharp swing of the U.S. pendulum which would harden their attitudes and make greater cooperation very difficult for the Pakistani people to accept,” he said.

The State Department on Tuesday released some 30,000 emails.

Greater leverage

Mr. Berger, in his e-mail, notes that there may be greater leverage in giving the Pakistanis incentives to be more aggressive.

“Of course, the military’s calculation is most important. I’m not sure what is on their shopping list these days but we would need to balance what would move the needle on AQ against undercutting our effort to get them to shift their strategic focus away from India,” he wrote.

“At the same time, we can be as forward leaning as possible in support of their counterinsurgency capabilities [equipment, training, whatever material, intelligence and other assistance we can give them if they move into Wazeristan — including relief for displaced persons]. If they finally take that step, we can do all that is possible to demonstrate that our arrows are aligned with theirs,” advised Berger.

Some of the e-mails also have mention about India, but these are mostly related to her India travel in 2009.

The e-mails released by the State Department are the first batch from a pool of more than 50,000 pages turned over by Ms. Clinton from her private e-mail server.