Pakistan warns of troops movements away from fight with al Qaeda, Taliban

Guardian:

Senior Pakistani intelligence officials have threatened to end military operations against Islamist militants along the country's Afghan border if India deploys troops on their eastern frontier.

In a rare briefing to senior local journalists, intelligence officials said the coming days would be "crucial" and threatened to pull out all the troops committed to the "war on terror" in the event of "an unwanted conflict" with India. "We will not leave a single troop on the western [Afghan] border if we are threatened by India," an official was reported as saying.

Pakistan currently has more than 100,000 soldiers engaged in operations in the semi-autonomous tribal zones where senior international militants connected to al-Qaida, local extremists and a significant proportion of the Taliban's leadership are thought to be based.

The Pakistani operations, largely funded by the United States, are seen by Nato commanders as vital to keep open supply lines to their troops in Afghanistan and to block, or at least hinder, movement by militants across the porous Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

"These statements are aimed at sending a clear message to the US to intervene to defuse the situation, and that if India wants to use these tragic events as a pretext for a border conflict then that will not be tolerated," said Rasul Bakhsh Rais, professor of political science at Lahore University of Management Sciences.

"They are saying that if Pakistan has to choose between fighting India and fighting the militants, then it will fight India."

...

Of course that is just the strategic choice that the enemy was hoping to force on both Pakistan and India as well as the US and its allies. What Pakistan needs to be doing is vigorously attacking those responsible for the attacks in India. They should not be that hard to find. A captured terrorist has pretty well laid out the scheme and where they planned and practiced. A captured telephone has given them the numbers of those called for directions before the attacks. It makes you wonder why the Pakistanis are issueing statements rather than warrants for arrests.

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