‘Hillary was advised to act against pro-militant Pak military officers’

ISLAMABAD: So fed up was the United States with the Pakistan military in 2001 that a former national security adviser told then secretary of state Hillary Clinton that Washington “should go after bank accounts, travel and other reachable assets of individual Pakistani officers, raising the stakes for those supporting the militants without creating an inordinate backlash.”
This and 30,000 more emails were released by the State Department and are the first batch from a pool of more than 50,000 pages turned over by Clinton from her private email server.
But doing the rounds since Tuesday night are those related to Pakistan and shows the frustration of American advisers who suspected that Pakistani military leaders were on the sly supporting al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
“I believe that coercive measures are more likely to be effective if they are targeted against military leaders who give support to AQ (al-Qaeda) and its allies,” Samuel Richard Berger said in his email to Clinton, at her request.
“Assuming we have adequate intelligence, we can go after bank accounts, travel and other reachable assets of individual Pakistani officers, raising the stakes for those supporting the militants without creating an inordinate backlash,” Berger said.
“Blunter measures of coercion, like conditioning our assistance, are more likely to be counterproductive. Given the level of distrust for us among the Pakistani people, they would see this as another sharp swing of the US pendulum which would harden their attitudes and make greater cooperation very difficult for the Pakistani people to accept,” he said.
“Of course, the military’s calculation is most important. I’m not sure what is on their shopping list these days but we would need to balance what would move the needle on AQ against undercutting our effort to get them to shift their strategic focus away from India,” he wrote.
“At the same time, we can be as forward leaning as possible in support of their counterinsurgency capabilities (equipment, training, whatever material, intelligence and other assistance we can give them if they move into Waziristan — including relief for displaced persons). If they finally take that step, we can do all that is possible to demonstrate that our arrows are aligned with theirs,” advised Berger.