US mulls restoring security assistance to Pakistan: Washington Times
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WASHINGTON - According to *Washington Times, link* A battle is brewing inside the Trump administration over whether to reconsider the president’s aggressive policy of withholding millions of dollars in sensitive security assistance to Pakistan on grounds that the South Asian nation is ready to reconsider its willingness to provide safe haven to terrorists nearly two decades after 9/11.
Washington has long made clear its frustration with Islamabad’s “tolerance of Taliban” and other “Islamist factions” within its borders, saying it enables an “insurgency in neighboring Afghanistan” that Kabul and Washington have been unable to defeat.
With Pakistan last month holding a democratic transition of power for only the second time in its 71-year history, some of Mr. Trump’s top advisers argue that the time is ripe for Washington to begin restoring the military aid that the president cut from Islamabad at the start of the year.
“The Pakistanis needed to be put in their place,” one former White House adviser on Pakistan told The Washington Times, but a former U.S. ambassador to the country countered that “the recent cutting of security funds was an absolutely terrible decision.”
