WASHINGTON, July 28 : Terming the WikiLeaks reports implicating Pakistani intelligence for Taliban backing as raw and unprocessed, top US Senator John Kerry has urgd against overhyped reaction and he reminded the critics of Islamabad’s anti-terror progress over the last two years.“These documents appear to be primarily raw intelligence reports from the field. And as such, anybody who has dealt with these reports knows that some are completely dismissible, some of them are completely unreliable, and some of them are very reliable,” he said at a Congressional hearing on reconciliation options in Afghanistan.
The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the “raw intelligence needs to be processed properly, generally by people who have a context in which to put it.” “And so I think people need to be very careful in evaluating what they do read there,” he added.
The Democratic leader also emphasized that the events covered in these documents occurred before last December, when President Obama announced a new Afghanistan strategy clearly designed to address some of the very issues that are raised by these documents.
“Obviously in many cases, many of us have raised the issues in these documents with the Pakistanis and with the Afghans.”
He voiced concerned over the fact that after nearly nine years of war, more than 1,000 American casualties, and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, the Taliban appear to be as strong as they have been.
“And to successfully reverse that trend, it is going to be very important for us to depend on our partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
On the allegations about ties between extremists and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, he said, are not new.
“It is important for everybody to understand that. We have been wrestling with these allegations and we have made some progress. General Kayani, General Pasha, and others have been over here. We have had a number of meetings. We’ve been over there. This is not a sort of revelation of a topic. This is something we have been dealing with, and many people believe we are making some progress, particularly when measured against the offensives the Pakistanis themselves have taken in Swat and in South Waziristan, with great political difficulty and with great risk to themselves. “
“And I think that when those extremists crossed over the Indus River last year, the threat became clear to the rest of Islamabad and Pakistan. I think the Pakistani people have now recognized the threat posed by homegrown extremists, and their government and military have responded,” added Kerry. |
