A key US Senator Tim Kaine has said that under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif Pakistan is moving away from terrorism.
Senator Kaine, a top Democrat, is a member of two powerful Senate committees on foreign relations and armed service. He met the prime minister last week, when he visited the US Congress and met members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“War against terrorism, continued presence of terrorist safe havens was one of the major topics of discussion with the visiting Pakistani leader,” he said at a meeting with Defence Writers Group in Washington.
“My sense is that Pakistan is now really going after enclaves of terrorists in North Waziristan and other areas. They are sincerely doing it,” he said.
“Those organisations are feeling tough pressure. They are fighting back on the Pakistani government because they are feeling that the Pakistani government is cracking down on them,” he added.
However, Kaine was not surprised to hear Pervez Musharraf’s recent claims that Pakistan had links with militant groups.
“I think that the evidence about ties between some aspects of the Pakistani government with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in connection with the attack in Mumbai in 2008 is pretty hard to deny,” he claimed.
“When you get into the intel and explore, you get the questions how high the ties were and how officially they were sanctioned but there were definitely ties,” said Mr Kaine.
Mr. Kaine had visited the 26/11 terrorist attack sites in Mumbai last October.
“The connection between those attackers and at least some elements in the Pakistani government, I do not think they can be credibly denied.’
