Thaindian News

Washington, July 31 (ANI): A former American expert believes that the US has attained little success in changing Pakistan’s attitude towards India.

Former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Teresita Schaffer said while Washington has repeatedly asked Pakistan to focus more on the internal threat posed by the Taliban rather than considering India as a major threat to its interests, it has failed to redirect Islamabad’s concern towards the real danger.

“I think that the US government is deluding itself on that score,” said Schaffer.

“The Pakistani Army now believes the Pakistani Taliban are a threat worth taking seriously. But I do not believe they consider that this in any way diminishes or puts into second place the threat from India,” she added.

Referring to the controversial Indo-Pak joint statement which was issued by both countries on the sidelines of the NAM summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Schaffer said the document would hardly make any difference in relations between both neighbours.

She believed that whenever the foreign secretaries of both countries meet, they would give majority of time to Mumbai attacks.

“The next time the foreign secretaries of the two countries do sit down, they are going to spend 97 percent of their time talking about the attacks on Mumbai,” The Christian Science Monitor quoted Schaffer, as saying.

Indian experts are also skeptical about Pakistan’s ability to move away from militancy.

“I’ve lost all faith in Pakistan” since the Mumbai attacks. It’s a dysfunctional, pathological state which needs to be reconstructed from the ground up,” said Dr. Sumit Ganguly, a visiting scholar at Stanford University. (ANI)