Pak defence min admits funding terror groups, US tells India to hunt down terrorists

Pakistan’s defence minister Khawaja Asif admitted in an interview that Pak has harboured and funded terror organisations, claiming it had been “doing the West’s dirty work for decades”. However, he claimed that Pakistan had no role in the Pahalgam terror attack that left at least 26 dead and said that India “staged it” to “create some sort of crisis in the region, particularly for us”. Asif also claimed in the interview that the Lashkar-e-Taiba was “extinct” and that its offshoot said to be behind the attack - The Resistance Front (TRF) - did not exist. While the Pakistan defence minister also called on the US President to de-escalate the situation between India and Pakistan, a top US government official endorsed India hunting down the terrorists behind the attack. Meanwhile, evidence also emerged that the terrorists had targeted the tourists based on their faith and even made many of them go through a barbaric ‘test’ to ascertain their captives’ faith. Pakistan defence minister claims Pahalgam attack staged When asked by Sky’s Yalda Hakim on Thursday night whether he admitted Pakistan has a long history of backing, funding and training terror organisations, the country’s defence minister said: “We have been doing this dirty work for the USA for about three decades and for the West, including Britain.”Pakistan defence minister Khawaja Asif added that was “a mistake” that the country suffered for. “If we had not joined the war against the Soviet Union and the war after 9/11, Pakistan’s track record was unimpeachable,” he claimed.The defence minister said the Pakistan-based terror groups are “not multiple organisations” but “one single organisation religiously organised with different faces”.He said terror groups in Pakistan were “used as proxies by the USA”, and earlier the same terror groups had been treated like VIPs in Washington.“When we were fighting the war on their side in the ’80s against the Soviet Union, all these terrorists of today, they were wining and dining in Washington. Then came 9/11.” 120644842Asif claimed that Pakistan was not involved in the deadly attack in Pahalgam and that India “staged it” to “create some sort of crisis in the region, particularly for us”. “It was staged in Pulwama too,” he alleged.“They never come up with any evidence for these incidents in Kashmir. They just blame Pakistan and create a situation for their own advantage — it doesn’t mean Pakistan was behind it because Lashkar-e-Taiba had some linkages to Pakistan in the past. We had nothing to do with it. LeT does not exist in Pakistan anymore. It is extinct,” he claimed.“When President Clinton was there, there was a terror attack on Sikhs and it was blamed on some never-heard-of terror organisation. This time again the people who are being accused are not known and it is an organisation we have never heard of,” he said referring to The Resistance Front, which has claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam attack.When confronted that TRF was an offshoot of LeT, Asif said: “If the parent organisation does not exist, how can the offshoot take birth?” mediumhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir8pJbKE37UThe defence minister said that Pakistan would respond “in kind” to any attack by nuclear rival New Delhi in retaliation for Pahalgam and called on US President Donald Trump to “bring sanity to the situation”.“We have already prepared for it — any eventuality that takes place. We will measure our response to whatever is initiated by India. If there is an all-out attack obviously there will be all-out war,” he said. US says hunt down terrorists behind attackThe United States on Friday urged India to hunt down the Islamist terrorists behind the Pahalgam attack. These words of support came despite Islamabad raising alarm about an all-out war if India acted to eliminate terrorists in Pakistan.“We are with you and support you as you hunt down those responsible for this heinous attack,” US intelligence czar Tulsi Gabbard said, calling it an “Islamist terrorist attack, targeting and killing 26 Hindus”.Among the Pahalgam victims were 23 Hindus, one Muslim, one Christian and one animist. Gabbard, who is a Hindu-American, was following up President Donald Trump’s phone call to PM Modi in which he pledged “full support” to India to bring the perpetrators to justice.Trump has previously said, in the aftermath of the Pulwama terrorist attack in 2019, that India has the right to self-defence against terrorist attacks. The latest statements seemed to suggest Washington would have no issue if New Delhi took action against Pakistan, inside Pakistan. 120644915While the Pakistan defence minister sparked controversy by admitting to the country harbouring terrorists, he was referring to US bankrolling the so-called mujahidin during the war in Afghanistan to drive out the Soviets. The current dispensation - which has little tolerance for Islamist terrorism - is acknowledging that the US turned a blind eye to Pakistan pivoting its jihadis towards India. “No country should be forced to endure such heinous acts of terrorism year after year. We all bear responsibility for this — especially the US — for failing to hold Pakistan accountable for embracing terrorism as a tool of its foreign policy for decades,” said Jeff Smith, director of Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.Urging the Trump administration to break new boundaries strengthening counterterrorism cooperation with India, Smith said if the Pahalgam attack, like so many of its predecessors, is traced back to Pakistan, “there must be accountability”.Leading a vast intelligence apparatus with the tools and capacity to home in on evidence, Gabbard appeared to go even further, encouraging a hunt for the perpetrators beyond India’s borders. medium nocaption120644946US support in the Trump dispensation following the latest attack is markedly different from the cautious restraining hand that Democratic administrations exercised. The approach still influences the mostly liberal US media, one of whose sentinels, New York Times, headlined its story “At least 24 tourists gunned down by militants in Kashmir”.How terrorists verified victims’ religionThe trousers of around 20 victims of the dastardly Pahalgam attack — all males — were found unzipped or pulled down by the team of officials that carried out the first examination of the 26 lifeless, bullet-riddled bodies. This is being seen as confirmation that terrorists had established the faith of the tourists before killing them in cold blood.Twenty-five of the 26 people killed in the attack were Hindus, all of them male.A team comprising officers of the Army, J&K police and J&K administration found to their horror that clothing from the lower body of 20 of the 26 victims had been forcibly dislodged, with their pant zippers undone, pants pulled down, exposing their underwear or private parts. The victims’ kin were possibly too much in shock to have noticed the state of the clothing on the bodies; even the staff retrieved the bodies as they were, simply covering them with a shroud. medium nocaption120644974It was only the team of officers tasked with a thorough examination of the bodies — possibly for the purpose of recording finer details to be included in the FIR — that noticed the tell-tale signs of how the terrorists had subjected the male victims to the medieval, barbaric faith-determination test just to establish their faith.Eyewitness accounts also confirmed that the terrorists had attempted to ascertain the faith of every victim by asking for identity proof like Aadhaar card, ordering them to recite the kalma (a Muslim prayer verse) or asking them to remove their lower clothing so that they could check for circumcision. Once their identities were established through these 3 ‘tests’, the terrorists shot the victims at close range.Reporting by Naomi Canton in London, Chidanand Rajghatta in Washington and Bharti Jain