Pakistani Political Party Added To US Terror List

The United States continued to pressure Pakistan to act against Islamic terror organizations this week by adding the Milli Muslim League (MML) political party to Lashkar-e-Taiba’s (LeT) designation on the list of foreign terrorist entities, noting its status as an LeT front group.  The move by the US Department of State also gives Tehreek-e-Azadi Jammu and Kashmir (TAJK), an Islamic terror outfit and rebranded version of LeT sister group Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) that operates out of northwest India, the same designation.

The MML was founded in 2017 by Hafeez Mohammad Saeed, co-founder of the deadly LeT Islamic terror organization and known mastermind behind this group’s 11/26 attacks in Mumbai that resulted in the deaths of 160+ people, reigning chaos and instilling fear across the city over a four-day timespan. The Milli Muslim League, like TAJK, is a known front organization for LeT, and its founder currently has a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head.

This move by the U.S. falls in line with several other actions taken recently aimed at curbing Pakistan’s notorious role as a terrorist safe-haven. These actions include withholding $255 million in aid, a move the U.S. threatens to make permanent, and in a U.S. push to place Pakistan on the Financial Action Task Force’s terrorism-financing watch list. The U.S. action on MML comes on the heels of last month’s ruling by Pakistan’s High Court allowing the MML to participate in the national elections being held later this year.

While Saeed has been under house arrest in Lahore since the end of January 2018, there exists serious concern that the ruling on MML may be viewed by moderate Pakistanis and the international community as giving political legitimacy to known terror groups and their supporters. The MML’s recognition as a legitimate political party also creates another registered avenue through which finances and resources can be laundered to the LeT or for other terrorist activity.

The MML terror designation merely continues to shed light on a significant issue that has been widespread in Pakistan for years. The Pakistani government’s insufficient efforts to subject major terror figures to justice and to address the operational impunity of several known terror groups within its borders demonstrates that they are either unable or unwilling to deal with such issues in a manner conducive to combating terrorism in a normative fashion. A seeming unwillingness by Pakistan to cooperate with the U.S. and effectively address such an issue becomes even more disconcerting when one considers the continuing uptick in warming of relations between the Pakistanis and the Chinese or the Russians, both of whom seem content to remain hands-off when it comes to Pakistan’s domestic handling of individuals like Saeed and terror groups like LeT.

The frosty nature that has come to define U.S.-Pak relations as of late has its roots in Pakistani patterns of behavior dating back several years.  The implementation of increasingly hardline measures and continued pressure on Pakistan by the U.S. government aims to eliminate this pattern, while establishing what was once seen as a cooperative partner in addressing strategic issues of terrorism in the region and the effects those issues bear globally.