S.E. Asia being targeted by global jihad: NYT

New York : South East Asia is increasingly being targeted by international mujahideen forces as part of a global jihad, reports the New York Times.
According to an article in the paper, Pakistan is intervening in a number of these foreign conflicts, and that its intelligence service (Inter-Services Intelligence or ISI) has long acted as the manager of these international mujahedeen forces, many of them Sunni extremists, which is having a telling and damaging impact on countries located in the South East Asian region.The NYT says in an op-ed piece that there is even speculation that Islamabad may have been involved in the rise of the Islamic State (IS).
It quotes experts as saying that there is enough evidence available in the public domain to suggest that Pakistan has been facilitating and encouraging Taliban-related offensives in neighbouring Afghanistan, where it’s President, Ashraf Ghani has appealed to the global community to exert pressure on Islamabad to cease this indirect form of aggression.President Ghani has said in recent interviews that there is an urgent need for Afghanistan to convince countries like the United States and China, besides the rest of the international community, to work for increased regional cooperation and international mediation to ensure that Pakistan comes to the negotiating table.
Afghanistan, according to the article in the NYT, has often argued that Islamabad has done nothing to rein in the Taliban, and if anything, has encouraged the latter to raise the stakes in hopes of gaining influence in any power-sharing agreement.It says that the latest Taliban offensive began in 2014.It says that Pakistan, after years of prevarication, decided to clear Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters from their sanctuary in North Waziristan, but before activating the eradication and displacement exercise, tipped off the militants early enough to allow them to flee across the border into Afghanistan, just when a vulnerable Afghanistan was assuming responsibility for its own security.
Arriving in the border province of Paktika, the Taliban fighters reportedly occupied abandoned C.I.A. bases and outposts to launch further attacks deeper into Afghanistan and even up to Kabul. Some of the most devastating suicide bomb attacks occurred in that province in the months that followed, the NYT article reveals. Simultaneously, in Pakistan, the Haqqani network, the most potent branch of the Taliban, moved from North Waziristan into adjacent Kurram District, from where it reportedly conducts its insurgency against American, international and Afghan targets.