'LeT could take over Pakistan'

WASHINGTON - An US expert on South Asia says that Pakistan faces the danger of being taken over not by the Taliban, but by Lashkar-e-Taiba, and calls for disarming the group’s militias.
‘The danger of an Islamist takeover of Pakistan is real’, Selig Harrison author, known for his pro-India views, wrote in Wednesday’s edition of The Boston Globe.
‘But it does not come from the Taliban guerillas now battling the Pakistan Army in the Swat borderlands. It comes from a proliferating network of heavily armed Islamist militias in the Punjab heartland and major cities directed by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a close ally of al Qaeda, which staged the terrorist attack last November in Mumbai, India’.
He called on the US not to make new aid commitments to Pakistan until it takes decisive action to disarm Lashkar-e-Taiba in accordance with Article 256 of the Pakistan Constitution, which bars private militias.
‘Disarming Lashkar-e-Taiba should be the top US priority in Pakistan because it would greatly reduce the possibility of a coup by Islamist sympathizers in the Armed Forces’, Harrison wrote.
‘The Islamists in the Army and the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) are not likely to risk a coup in Islamabad unless they can count on armed support from Lashkar-e-Taiba and its allies to help them consolidate their grip on the countryside’.
‘Equally important, a strong US stand on Lashkar-e-Taiba is necessary to defuse India-Pakistan tensions that could lead to another war and to sustain the improvement now taking place in US relations with India, a rising power eight times larger than Pakistan’. Stating that New Delhi views US readiness to pressure Islamabad on the militias as a litmus test of US friendship, the article said:’To be sure, the Pakistan govt did make a show of cracking down on Lashkar-e-Taiba after the Mumbai tragedy... (but) the govt stopped short of breaking up the militias and destroying the weapons stockpiles at their four training camps near Muridke and Muzaffarabad, and it has yet to prosecute the six prisoners or to arrest Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, identified by US and Indian intelligence sources as the ringleader of the Mumbai attack, who is still at large.