Clinton says Haqqani designation not message to Pakistan

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said blacklisting the Afghan Haqqani militant group – operating along Pak-Afghan border and blamed for several attacks on American troops in Afghanistan – is not a message aimed at Pakistan.“No, it is about squeezing” the Haqqanis, she told Bloomberg Radio, days after designating the militant group as a foreign terrorist organization.
“It’s part of the continuing effort to try to send a message to them (Haqqanis) — not to anyone else, but to them — because of the really incredibly damaging attacks they have waged against us, against other targets inside Afghanistan, and it’s important that we use every tool at our disposal to go after them,” she said, according to a Bloomberg report posted on its website. Before pronouncing last week’s decision, Washington had already slapped the Haqqani group’s leaders with individual sanctions.
Over the past several months, the United States has been targeting the Haqqani affiliated militants with clandestine drone strikes against their suspected hideouts in Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan.
Soon after the designation of the group, the U.S. last week explained that the step was in no way targeted against Pakistan or any of its government institutions. Senior Administration officials also said Washington was not at all considering any process towards declaring Pakistan a state sponsor of terror in view of the Haqqanis being able to use its tribal territory. In the interview, Clinton noted that adding the Haqqanis to the group blacklist “gives us much greater reach into any financial assets or fundraising that they may engage in, it gives us better traction against assets that they might own.” The top American diplomat declined to say whether she also would tag the Afghan Taliban a foreign terrorist organization.
Questioned if the Taliban – who before 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States had given sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terror network – should also be blacklisted, Clinton didn’t directly answer. “You know, we do a very intensive analysis before we designate someone as a foreign terrorist organization,” she said.
“We have reached that conclusion about the Haqqani Network, and we think it’s the right decision,” she stated, according to the news organization.
The State Department’s Sept. 7 determination to designate as a terrorist organization the Haqqani Network – which is closely affiliated with the AfghanTaliban — came after months of inter-agency deliberations on several implications.
The process involved discussions within the White House, State Department, Pentagon, Treasury Department, Justice Department and the intelligence community over the merits and the timing of the move.