Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif draws blank on Kashmir; receives earful on terrorism

WASHINGTON: Pakistan’s efforts to raise the stakes on the Kashmir issue, including by rattling its nuclear arsenal, has misfired.

With the eyes of the world on the country following the emergence of yet another Pakistan-inspired terrorist in America, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, was told by western interlocutors to back down from repeated confrontation with India and address its nurturing of terrorists.

Verbal finesse could barely couch the dressing down that Sharif, regarded as a stooge of Pakistan’s ruling military junta, got from US Secretary of State John Kerry , long seen as sympathetic to Islamabad.

"The Secretary reiterated the need for Pakistan to prevent all terrorists from using Pakistani territory as safe havens," a State Department readout of Kerry’s meeting with Sharif said bluntly amid other diplomatic pabulum.

Implicit in the use of the expression "prevent all terrorists" was a message that Pakistan’s so-called National Action Plan (Zarb-e-orb) is selective in sparing state-backed terrorists like Masood Azhar and Hafiz Saeed, who is proscribed by the very United Nations where Sharif intends to highlight the Kashmir issue on Wednesday.

The statement also said Sharif and Kerry expressed "strong concern with recent violence in Kashmir," and just so the state-tutored Pakistan media does not misinterpret it, it meaningfully added, "particularly the army base attack."

The statement also said Kerry "stressed the need for restraint in nuclear weapons programs," even as trigger-happy Pakistani leaders, including the country’s defense minister Khwaja Asif, spoke of using tactical nuclear weapons if Pakistan came under threat from India.

Many analysts reckon Pakistan’s failure to impress anyone of its stand on Kashmir stems from its record of reckless adventurism. That includes its long history of sponsoring terrorism (as proved conclusively in the Mumbai attack) and of nuclear proliferation to rogue countries.

This week has been particularly fraught for Islamabad diplomatically after it emerged that the New York-New Jersey bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami may have been radicalized during long stays in Pakistan . He joins the ranks of many terrorists, including Faizal Shahzad, son of a Pakistani Air Marshal who attempted to bomb the iconic Times Square, who have been radicalized in Pakistan.

Such a long chronicle of producing terrorists is starting to attract censure.

In a separate briefing, State Department spokesman Mark Toner was more direct, saying the US will "continue to urge Pakistan to take additional steps to deal with all of the terrorist threats that it faces on its own territory but also those groups that frankly, that seek refuge or safe refuge within Pakistan's borders."

"We've seen some progress; we want to see more, and I think moving forward we'll just continue to work closely and try to encourage greater counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan but also within the region," Toner said.

Again, the statement implied Pakistan has not been cooperating fully with the United States, which keeps the otherwise bankrupt country alive.

Sharif is expected to buttonhole Obama on the margins of the UN General Assembly to raise the Kashmir issue at the risk of getting another earful. The US President is said to have described Pakistan as a "disastrously dysfunctional" country and questioned why the US should be allied with it, something American analysts and even military generals have now begun to ask

Obama has also disdainfully avoided going to the country, despite two official visits to India and numerous stop overs in Afghanistan – after having promised he would visit in 2011 when Pakistanis begged him to come following his New Delhi trip.

For that matter, few leaders of influence or consequence appear to have any time for Pakistan’s antics.

Britain and NewZealand, whose leaders Sharif met to highlight the "Kashmir issue" largely ignored the matter, and without readouts of the meeting from their mandarins, it was left to the Pakistani media to belabor what he told them.