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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just designated the Haqqani network a foreign terrorist
organization. They are based along the Afghan border but inside of Pakistan in North Waziristan
where the United States has been pressuring the Pakistani government to take military
against them for some time. There are three things that you probably need to know about
this decision to designate.
The first is, at one level, the designation is probably less than meets the eye. That
is, it is a bureaucratic, internal, U.S. government maneuver. The United States has already been
going after the Haqqani network in a variety of different ways including drone strikes,
attacking some of their financial networks, designating specific members of the Haqqanis
as terrorists. And so in many ways this is just making formal a process that has already
been in place for some period of time.
That said, the second thing you need to know about this decision is that the Pakistanis,
or many in Pakistan, will still be upset by it. In particular the military and intelligence
service will see it as a move that could lead down a slippery slope to the United States
eventually designating the Pakistani government a state sponsor of terrorism because the Pakistanis
officially have had ties or are believed to have had ties, and continue to have ties with
the Haqqanis. If those ties persist, this may be a precursor to a boarder U.S. decision
to label them a state sponsor of terrorism. They will also be upset with the fact that
this could raise the barrier to Haqqani network participating in reconciliation talks with
the U.S. government and government in Kabul, the Afghan government. That is because it
will be far harder for the Haqqanis to attend these talks if they are seen as terrorists.
They will has less reason to trust that the United States government is actually interested
and willing to make a commitment to them, and therefore they will stay away. And for
those in Pakistan who perceive that reconciliation must include the Haqqanis, this will be seen
as a set in the wrong direction.
The third thing though that you need to know about this decision is that it was the right
decision by the Obama administration. It was the right decision because it provides clarity.
It provides clarity within the U.S. government about how officially the United States government
sees the Haqqani network, the extent to which it perceives that it can be reconciled with.
It makes it very clear that their international terrorist ties including to al-Qaeda cannot
be overlooked. That the Haqqanis would need to make a very significant change before they
can be brought into any real reconciliation dialogue. So it provides clarity there and
it also provides clarity to the Pakistanis themselves. The United States needs to make
it clear to Pakistan that it needs to make a choice. If it continues to work with groups
like the Haqqanis, continues to treat them as legitimate insurgent groups rather than
international terrorists, there will continue to be a problem - a deep problem - with the
U.S. government that will note overcome easily and Pakistan will need to factor that in to
its decision making calculation.