US president Donald Trump was \u201cnot satisfied\u201d with the progress shown by Pakistan in its fight against terrorism in line with the South Asia strategy he had announced last August, the White House said, as American officials continued to press a Paris-based world body on terror financing to put the country on a watchlist.<\/p>\n
The United States has seen \u201cmodest progress\u201d in terms of Pakistan\u2019s acknowledgement of \u201cthese concerns\u201d, White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah said while speaking to reporters in response to a question. Shah added this administration had brought some \u201cclarity\u201d to the relationship with Pakistan, a one-time ally, by holding it \u201caccountable for its actions\u201d.<\/p>\n
Though the spokesperson did not spell out the \u201cconcerns\u201d, they are and have remained the same for years, traversing administrations Democratic and Republican, that Pakistan supports terrorism as a state policy, and offers shelter and safe-haven to them from which they carry out attacks across the border.<\/p>\n
President Trump accused Pakistan of accepting $33 billion in aid from America and giving back in return only \u201clies and deceit\u201d on Twitter on January 1. Just days later, the US announced it was suspending nearly $2 billion in security-related aid to Pakistan and set aside less money for it in the budget.<\/p>\n
It also proposed to the Paris-based terror-financing global watchdog, Financial Action Task Force, to put Pakistan on a watchlist, called the \u201cgrey list\u201d, that are countries with \u201cweak measures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing\u201d.<\/p>\n
Pakistan was on the list from 2012 to 2015 and its officials fear that being put on it again would be devastating for the economy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe international community has consistently expressed its long-standing concerns about ongoing deficiencies in Pakistan\u2019s implementation of its anti-money laundering\/counterterrorism finance regime. These concerns remain, even as Pakistan has recently begun to take action to address these deficiencies,\u201d a state department spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States encourages Pakistan to continue efforts to meet its international obligations on countering the financing of terrorism. We look forward to additional information on how Pakistan is meeting these obligations,\u201d the spokesperson added.<\/p>\n
The task force\u2019s plenary will decide and an announcement is expected either way on Friday evening when the body wraps up its three days of deliberations.<\/p>\n
Islamabad has indicated it might escape the guillotine as there is no \u201cconsensus\u201d in the body.<\/p>\n
China and Turkey are said to be opposing the US-sponsored proposal along with Saudi Arabia. But Americans are believed to be working on Saudi Arabia, whose ruling family enjoys a good rapport with Trump and his family.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US president Donald Trump was \u201cnot satisfied\u201d with the progress shown by Pakistan in its fight against terrorism in line with the South Asia strategy he had announced last August, the White House said, as American officials continued to press a Paris-based world body on terror financing to put the country on a watchlist. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22809,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22808"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22810,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22808\/revisions\/22810"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}