Pentagon expresses concern over increasing LeT activity

Top Pentagon officials have expressed strong concern over the increasing influence of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based terrorist outfit, in South Asia and the its damaging potential to bring India and Pakistan on the verge of war through a terrorist activity.

"We're very concerned about that interaction that LeT is having on India and the effect, the compression effect that you have between two nuclear powers when there is an attack into India from LeT," Major General Randolph Alles Director, J-5, Strategic Planning and Policy, US Pacific Command, said in his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.

"We're concerned, as we look at the South Asia region, with the LeT, or the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group, which emanates out of Pakistan but has a presence in India and Nepal and Bangladesh. The LeT is responsible for the Mumbai attacks, where so many people lost their lives," he said.

The Pentagon, he said, is attempting to address that by focusing not only in India but also in Bangladesh and Nepal, to assure that they work on facilitation networks, and more importantly how they address building the capacity of its partners to, in fact, address those internal issues so that they can secure their borders, so that they have developed networks for intelligence; they can develop intelligence on things that might be occurring inside of their country, and then also law enforcement and actual counterterrorism operations.

At another Congressional hearing convened by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Claire McCaskill, wanted to know from Gen David Patraeus, Commander of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, about the LeT operations in South Asia.

"I am anxious to get some kind of briefing from you for the record on LeT, especially in light of the instability of the Pakistani government right now and some of the issues we're having with incidents that have occurred in Pakistan and how the Pakistan government is responding to those," McCaskill said.

"I worry that we're honing in and doing what we need to do with Al Qaida. We are honing in and doing what we need to do with the Taliban. Pakistan has nuclear weapons and LeT obviously has got a great deal of power, it appears, with certain people in the Pakistani government," the Senator said.