Pakistan is under a lot of pressure at the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) meeting, currently under way in Paris, to rein in terror groups operating from its soil, India’s National Security Advisor Ajit Doval said on Monday. Doval, who was addressing a meeting of the chiefs of the Anti Terrorism Squads (ATS), said the biggest pressure on Pakistan comes from the functionaries of the FATF. In the present context no country can afford to go for a war as the financial and human costs are huge and no one is sure about victory, he said.
"Pakistan has been using terrorism as the instrument of state policy," Doval said. The FATF is an inter-governmental body established in 1989 to combat terrorist financing and other related threats to the integrity of the international financial system. As current FATF President, China’s stand on Pakistan would take centre-stage at the six-day FATF plenary meeting being held in Paris in the backdrop of this weekend’s second informal summit between Indian PM Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
At the summit held on the eve of the FATF meet, Xi is understood to have recognized the importance of working together to ensure that the international community strengthens the framework against training, financing and training of terror groups on a non-discriminatory basis.
At the last FATF meet in June, Pakistan secured the three needed votes of China, Turkey and Malaysia to avoid inclusion in a blacklist. But Pakistan has fared poorly in the recently-released report of FATF’s Asia Pacific Group on terror funding. The Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) recently made public its report on money-laundering and terror-financing in Pakistan.
With the exception of some recent actions…, Pakistan has not taken sufficient measures to fully implement UNSCR 1267 obligations against all listed individuals and entities - especially those associated with Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)/Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), and Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation (FIF) as well as the groups' leader Hafiz Saeed," the FATF-APG report said.