'US needs to push Pak to hand over Dawood, LeT men to India'

Lalit K Jha
Washington, Feb 19 (PTI) For bringing permanent Indo-Pak
peace, the Obama administration must push Pakistan to hand
over LeT terrorists responsible for the Mumbai attacks and
underworld don Dawood Ibrahim to India, a former top White
House official has said.
Besides helping the two countries pave the way for a
constructive dialogue on Kashmir, the US needs to disrupt the
LeT's fundraising and planning, said Juan C Zarate, who was
the Deputy Assistant to the US President and Deputy National
Security Adviser for Combating Terrorism from 2005 to 2009.
"The focus should be on unearthing names and disrupting
cells outside Pakistan that are tied to Lashkar-e-Taiba, which
involves pressuring Islamabad for the names of Westerners who
may have trained at Lashkar-e-Taiba camps," he wrote in an
opinion piece in 'The Washington Post'.
He said the Obama administration must push Pakistan to
hand over LeT terrorists responsible for the Mumbai attacks
and Dawood Ibrahim to India, in order to bring permanent peace
between the two countries.
Currently a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic
and International Studies, a Washington-based think-tank,
Zarate warned that LeT would try to derail the future Indo-Pak
talks.
"The group does not want peace talks to resume, so it
might act to derail progress. Elements of the group may see
conflict with India as in their interest, especially after
months of unrest in Kashmir. And the Pakistani government may
not be able to control the monster it created," he wrote.
A war in South Asia would be disastrous, he said.
In addition to the human devastation, it would destroy
efforts to bring stability to the region and disrupt terrorist
havens in western Pakistan, he said.
"Worse, the Pakistani government might be induced to make
common cause with Lashkar-e-Taiba, launching a proxy fight
against India. Such a war would also fuel even more
destructive violent extremism within Pakistan," he wrote.
"In the worst-case scenario, an attack could lead to a
nuclear war between India and Pakistan. India's superior
conventional forces threaten Pakistan, and Islamabad could
resort to nuclear weapons were a serious conflict to erupt,"
Zarate said.

Noting that LeT is a Frankenstein's monster of the
Pakistani government's creation 20 years ago, Zarate said
Lashkar holds the match that could spark a conflagration
between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. The US should be
directing political and diplomatic capital to prevent such a
conflagration.
The meeting between Indian and Pakistani officials in
Bhutan this month - their first high-level sit-down since last
summer - set the stage for restarting serious talks on the
thorny issue of Kashmir, Zarate wrote.
"Washington has only so much time. Indian officials are
increasingly dissatisfied with Pakistan's attempts to
constrain Lashkar-e-Taiba and remain convinced that Pakistani
intelligence supports the group," he wrote in the Post. PTI
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