Train your guns on Terrorists, not Inda - Hillary to Pakistan

WASHINGTON: The United States will institute benchmarks that Pakistan will have to meet, including scaling down its confrontational posture against 
India, if Islamabad is to earn the massive foreign aid Washington and its partners are lining up, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton indicated on Thursday.

The benchmarks will include moving troops from its border with India to its insurgency stricken areas to fight its homegrown terrorism problem, Clinton suggested, following up on the broad US prescription and advice to Pakistan that its grave domestic situation, and not India, constituted the biggest danger to its existence.

Clinton provided the assurances about benchmarks at the urging of some lawmakers, but said she would prefer they remain an executive decision rather than legislative so that the administration would not be paralyzed. Some of the benchmarks would be classified, but the administration would share them with Congress.

"You know, on a simple measure, is the Pakistani military still amassing hundreds of thousands of troops on the Indian border, or have they begun to move those toward these insurgent areas?" Clinton explained at a Congressional hearing, citing the example of one such benchmark. "What kind of kinetic action are they taking? How much? Is there increasing up-tempo or not? Is it sporadic, so they start in and then they move back?"

"I agree with you completely that we need the internal benchmarks," she told an anxious lawmaker, adding the approach would be across the government. "The intelligence community will have certain measurements; the Defense Department will; we (the State Department) will look as well."

The Pakistani government — and some of its supporters like Senator John Kerry — has opposed legislative benchmarks, especially those which condition US aid to Pakistan ending its sponsorship of terrorism against India, saying they are humiliating. But lawmakers on the House side are against giving Pakistan a free ride given what they say is its history of double-dealing.