Leading US senators on Tuesday saw momentum for political reconciliation in Afghanistan in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death and urged a greater shift in focus to fighting extremism in Pakistan. Senator John Kerry, who recently visited the region, said that US forces' killing of bin Laden in Pakistan along with "security gains" in the Taliban's stronghold of southern Afghanistan "have created some political space."
"This is a critical moment in the war in Afghanistan," Kerry said at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chairs. "It's important that we seize that opportunity." "Middle- and low-level Taliban fighters, many of them want to come in from the battlefield. We need to work with the Afghan government in order to make sure that those who wish to lay down their arms can, in fact, do so," he said.
Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts and close ally of Obama, said that the United States should be concerned about extremists in Pakistan and the ease with which they cross the porous border with Afghanistan. "It will take adroit and persistent diplomacy to convince the Pakistani military leaders that the real threat to their sovereignty comes not from its eastern border and not from across the Atlantic, but it comes from violent extremists in their own country," Kerry said. Senator Richard Lugar, the top Republican on the same committee, questioned why the United States was spending some $120 billion a year in Afghanistan, where some 100,000 US troops are deployed.
"The question before us is whether Afghanistan is strategically important enough to justify the lives and massive resources that we are spending there, especially given that few terrorists in Afghanistan have global designs or reach," the Indiana lawmaker said. "To the extent that our purpose is to confront the global terrorist threat, we should be refocusing resources on Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, parts of North Africa and other locations," Lugar said.
Senators voiced concern about what they saw as support from Pakistan for the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba. Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, pointed to an ongoing trial in Chicago in which David Coleman Headley testified that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence provided support to Lashkar-e-Taiba. Headley, a Pakistani American, has admitted to scouting out sites in Mumbai for the attacks.
"I don't know how the United States can just ignore this. It seems to me that we need to be able to confront Pakistan's support for terrorist organisations," Cardin said. "US taxpayers are providing support to Pakistan today. And that's an issue that will come to the attention of the United States Congress," he said. Testifying before the committee, Paul Pillar, a professor at Georgetown University and former CIA analyst, said the Headley trial had forced concerns about Pakistani intelligence into the open.