Hillary Clinton approved Lashkar chief Hafiz Saeed's terrorist designation: US

WASHINGTON: The US government’s Rewards for Justice (RfJ) website describes him as a former professor of Arabic and engineering, but his current designation, going by the Obama administration’s conclusion, might well be Dean of Terrorism in Pakistan’s Jihad University.

The US justice department and state department on Monday put Islamabad squarely in the crosshairs of the war on terror by designating the Pakistani security establishment’s poster boy, Hafiz Saeed, as one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.

The decision followed the Obama administration’s conclusion, after months of deliberations, that Saeed was the principal planner of the 26/11 Mumbai carnage, a conclusion Indian investigators had reached long ago.

In fact, the state department notification advances the RfJ language on the subject, definitively saying, Saeed “participated in the planning of the 4-day long terrorist assault on Mumbai in 2008 that left 166 dead.” The RfJ billboard merely says Saeed “is suspected of masterminding numerous terrorist attacks, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks”.

US officials, countering speculation that the notification was timed to please India and/or punish Pakistan, said the decision on Saeed was part of a routine process. “This has been in the works for some time now,” a senior US administration official said, adding that it was “cleared by the RfJ Interagency Rewards Committee and approved by secretary of state Hillary Clinton.”

As it turned out, the notification came just after US undersecretary of state Wendy Sherman landed in Delhi, enabling her to convey the news to India’s foreign secretary Ranjan Mathai. By coincidence , it also came ahead of a separate visit to Pakistan by US deputy secretary of state Tom Nides to address even more difficult issues between Washington and Islamabad.

The inevitable conclusion by pundits was that the Obama administration is gaming the scenario in the subcontinent . Because of the location of the announcement, “the message seems to be to please India,” said Tufail Ahmed of the Middle East Media Research Institute, who suggested the US had taken a leaf out of the Pakistani book of providing some good news to its patrons on the eve of any visit.

Ahmed, however, said the announcement “will pile up pressure on Saeed and his Difa-e-Pakistan (Defence of Pakistan ) Council,” a coalition of 40 right-wing political parties and banned militant groups, which has been growing in size and clout with the blessings of Pakistan’s security establishment.