Media reports about the annual threat assessment presented to the US Senate Committee last Thursday by National Intelligence (NI) Director Daniel R Coats sound too damaging for Pakistan to ignore.
According to these reports, the US NI warns that Pakistan-based terrorist groups will present a sustained threat to US interests in the region and continue to plan and conduct attacks in India and Afghanistan.
“The threat to the United States and the West from Pakistan-based terrorist groups will be persistent,” the assessment maintained.
It further said that the groups that will pose the greatest threat to Pakistan’s internal security included the banned Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, al Qaeda, the Islamic State’s Khorasan group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi al-Alami.
More worrying is the part of assessment on our nuclear programme. It said early deployment during a crisis of Pakistan’s “smaller, more mobile nuclear weapons would increase the amount of time that systems would be outside the relative security of a storage site, increasing the risk that a coordinated attack by non-state actors might succeed in capturing a complete nuclear weapon”.
The US NI assessment consolidates the pro-India tilt in the US policy for the South Asian region, which could lead to further deterioration of relations with Pakistan, which is no longer seen as a close ally in the United States.
Here is why it is so. There are a number of highly influential lobbies in Washington working over-time to malign Pakistan, create problems for Islamabad and undermine this country’s socio-economic and diplomatic interests.
The most tendentious of these lobbies is the one sponsored and funded by the American Indians. The moral and material support to this lobby from New Delhi has increased manifold since the advent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Though its latest effort to get Pakistan declared as a pariah state for being allegedly a terror sponsoring state has miserably failed, there are no signs that it has given up its campaign in this regard.
Understandably, this campaign is finding popular traction among those Americans who are increasingly coming under the influence of the lobby suffering from Islamophobia. The anti-proliferation lobby, a highly influential circle of civil and political activists in Washington, also seems willing to join these two lobbies hoping to use the joint efforts to attain its own objective of relieving Pakistan of its nuclear assets.
The Jewish lobby has never been known to have missed an opportunity to join the anti-Pakistan voices in Washington.
And who does not know that most of the influential think tanks in Washington suffer from an acute anti-Russia and anti-China bias. Ideas that emanate from these think tanks on a daily basis have given rise to highly influential anti-Russia and anti-China lobbies in Washington.
And since the launch of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Pakistan also has, by association, become a target of the anti-China lobby. Since dubiously sourced media stories of Afghan Taliban getting material support from Russia started appearing in the international media, the anti-Russia lobby has, again by association, started classifying Pakistan as a country to be reviled regularly.
And the US media influenced by all these lobbies seem to have turned unduly hostile towards Pakistan.
When you sum up these anti-Pakistan efforts being made by all these lobbies, the effect appears to be rather highly suffocating for Pakistan in Washington. We seem to stand friendless in the capital of one of the major powers in today’s multi-polar world.