Abstract
Pakistan today is clearly both part of the problem and the solution to the threat of terrorism facing the United States. Although it did not set out to do so, the landmark report issued by the 9/11 Commission ended up highlighting Pakistan's deep involvement with international terrorism. For more than two decades, beginning with the Sikh insurgency in the Indian Punjab in the early 1980s, Islamabad consciously nurtured and supported terrorist groups as a means to secure its geopolitical goals vis-à-vis Afghanistan and India. Although in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks Islamabad made the difficult decisions to stand aside as the United States destroyed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and to assist Washington in hunting down the remnants of Al Qaeda, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's regime has regrettably still not irrevocably eschewed supporting terrorism as a matter of state policy. Unfortunately, the 9/11 Commission's report glossed over this fact.
Although Musharraf has been rightly commended for his courageous early post-9/11 decisions in the global war against terrorism, Pakistan today deliberately remains reluctant to pursue the Taliban along its northwestern frontier and continues to support various terrorist groups operating in Kashmir. The many welcome changes in Pakistan's strategic direction under Musharraf since September 11 have therefore not extended to completely renouncing terrorism as an instrument of national policy. Islamabad continues to support terrorist groups in pursuit of geopolitical interests it perceives as critical, such as securing a friendly, even pliant regime in Afghanistan and wresting the state of Jammu and Kashmir away from India.
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