Pakistan using terror groups in Kashmir to undermine peace effort: US diplomat to lawmakers

Pakistan has used terrorist groups in Jammu and Kashmir to undermine every peace effort and impacted human rights negatively, a Barrack Obama-era diplomat has told the US lawmakers. In a statement to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation, Alyssa Ayres, senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank, on Monday said the situation is complex in Kashmir. 

Aryes added that there is documented history of Pakistan-based terrorists active in Kashmir, and Kashmiris and the Government of India continue to face a difficult challenge of border security and terrorism in this region. 

"Terrorism has undermined every effort at peace in the last two decades and continues to create insecurity. I would also like to acknowledge the longstanding suffering of the Kashmiri Pandits, a Hindu community driven from their Kashmiri homeland in the early years of the insurgency at the beginning of the 1990s,” she said. 

The committee will schedule a hearing on "Stemming a Receding Tide: Human Rights and Democratic Values in Asia" on Tuesday. 

Meanwhile, India also attacked Pakistan at the UN, saying that if there is an ‘unfinished agenda’, it is that of tackling the scourge of terrorism and the country, a globally-recognised epicenter of the menace, which harbours and trains terrorists and hails them as martyrs. 

Exercising India's right to reply on Monday, First Secretary in the country's Permanent Mission to the UN Vidisha Maitra said: “Pakistan is a country which is globally recognised as the epicenter of terrorism, which by its own admission harbours and trains terrorists, and hails them as martyrs and consistently persecutes its ethnic and religious minorities.”