The Imran Khan government, which failed to meet another deadline to comply with the action plan outlined by the terrorist financing watchdog in Islamabad, is making a great effort to get off the Action Group’s ‘gray list’ International Finance, and tells the world that it should reward Pakistan for the measures taken to curb the financing of terrorism and money laundering.
Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi reflected optimism in Islamabad when he recently declared that Pakistan would be “very soon” off the gray list. Qureshi told a meeting in Pakistan’s seventh largest city, Multan, that Islamabad had complied with 80 percent of the FATF recommendations and that “very soon Pakistan will be on the FATF white list.”
Counterterrorism officials in New Delhi who have been tracking Pakistan’s implementation of measures said Islamabad appeared to rely heavily on lobbying firm Linden Strategies to sell its narrative that Pakistan was on track to meet its obligations and had been earned a pardon.
Much of this campaign is designed to identify and influence at least 12 of the 39 member states to endorse his request at the plenary meeting of the Paris-based global dirty money watchdog.
This speech, one of them said, was based mainly on three arguments that Pakistan had been making.
One, the Imran Khan government will attempt to show the arrest and conviction of some Lashkar-e-Tayyiba leaders to claim that it has cracked down on terrorists. Second, it is expected to highlight the actions taken under the anti-money laundering regime against entities of interest, including those linked to terrorist groups. Third, Pakistan is also expected to underline that it has met 21 of the 27 points of the action plan and is about to beat the bar on the remaining six points.
“These arguments are essentially a juggling of facts … a hoax,” said a senior Indian official. It is highly unlikely that someone will fall in love with them.
For example, it ignores the fact that Pakistan has yet to act against the 6,500 Pakistani terrorists mentioned in the May 2020 UN monitoring team report who have been deployed to Afghanistan to meet Pakistani objectives.
Pakistan had tried to impress the Asia Pacific Joint Group meeting last month by telling them about the arrest and conviction of a select group of the terrorist leader. But Pakistan was questioned, diplomats familiar with the procedures said, for the prosecution of UN-designated terrorists on ancillary charges and not for terrorist financing. A prominent example was the verdict of an anti-terror court in Lahore that convicted three members of Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and its front organization, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and awarded them lesser punishments. Like Abdul Rehman Makki, the brother-in-law of Lashkar’s co-founder Hafiz Saeed received an 18-month jail term that was later suspended by the Lahore High Court. It is not clear if Makki, who had designated a terrorist by the United States in 2010 and has a reward of 2 million dollars (32.6 million Pakistani rupees), had to pay the Pakistani fine of 20,000 rupees imposed by the court. Pakistan counter-terrorism. A few months earlier, Pakistani courts had ordered the release of 196 terrorists convicted by military courts.
Pakistan also had to face some embarrassing moments at the September meeting of the Asia Pacific Joint Group, where it was noted that Islamabad had failed to act against eight entities of concern mentioned in the action plan approved by the FATF and not-for-profit organizations notorious for channel funds to terrorist groups.
Officials also question the effectiveness of the three laws passed by parliament in a joint session. The laws, which were apparently aimed at plugging the possibility of terrorist financing, were riddled with loopholes and did not even have a provision to penalize government officials who support terrorism, said an observer from Pakistan.
Pakistan has a long history of taking cosmetic measures that it uses to persuade the international community to ease the pressure, he said, recalling how Islamabad had drawn up a list of 7,600 people reported as terrorists to the FATF in October 2018 to indicate that it was serious. . . Less than two years later, he deleted 3,600 names from this list, claiming they had been inappropriately added and had incomplete details of the people involved. Pakistan had told a visiting UN team earlier this year that it had been able to locate only 19 of the 130 people designated as terrorists by the world body’s security council.
.
