The Pentagon’s decision to block $300-million military aid to Pakistan for its failure to take sufficient action against Haqqani network shows that Islamabad can no longer expect “blank cheques” from the United States, according to experts.

“The blank cheque approach to soliciting Pakistan’s support against terrorism no longer holds in Washington among both legislative and executive branches of government — a development primarily the result of repeated American requests for Pakistani action against the Haqqani Network which has been implicated in attacks against Americans in Afghanistan,” Shamila Chaudhary, a former White House official and now a senior South Asia fellow, International Security Programme at New America, a think-tank, told PTI.

Ties have changed

The Obama administration’s decision to withhold a portion of the Coalition Support Funds from Pakistan shows just how much U.S.-Pakistan ties have changed since the days following the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration initiated a counter-terrorism-based assistance relationship with relatively few strings attached, she said.

Ms. Chaudhary was responding to questions on the decision of U.S. Defence Secretary Ashton Carter to not to give the necessary certification to the Congress that Pakistan is taking appropriate action against the Haqqani network. So the Pentagon has blocked $300 million in funds to Pakistan.

Now on, it will be more straightforward

“Under these circumstances, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship could become more straightforward about where its interests align and where they converge — a dynamic that would ultimately be more beneficial for long-term relations,” she argued.However, she noted that she does not think the CSF determination means the U.S.-Pakistan relationship was headed towards a downward spiral.

Still some equities in relationship

“There is still a great deal of bilateral engagement between the two countries on a range of issues, and the U.S. firmly believes Pakistan must play a role in conversations about a political resolution in Afghanistan — which means there are still some equities remaining in the relationship that must be considered and protected, even as the U.S. ramps up the pressure on Pakistan,” Ms. Chaudhary said.

“This step to hold Pakistan accountable for its failure to crack down on the Haqqani network was long overdue,” Lisa Curtis, an eminent South Asia expert, from The Heritage Foundation, said.“The move reflects that the U.S. Congress has finally lost patience with Pakistan’s facilitation of militants directly undermining the U.S. mission in Afghanistan,” she said.

15 years after 9/11, Pak is stubborn

“Fifteen years after 9/11, Pakistan stubbornly perpetuates its policy of harbouring the Taliban and Haqqani network. It’s about time the U.S. holds back some aid due to Pakistan’s damaging policies,” Ms. Curtis added.“I see it as a natural progression over time reflecting American disenchantment over repeated Pakistani promises which are never fulfilled,” said Aparna Pande, director, Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia at Hudson Institute, a Washington DC-based think-tank.

Promise to fight terror only on paper

“For the last few decades, Islamabad-Rawalpindi has always promised they will take action against terror groups and requested both for time as well as assistance [economic and military]. In earlier years Washington was willing to give benefit of doubt but it appears that is changing,” she said.The Haqqani Network has carried out a number of kidnappings and attacks against U.S. interests in Afghanistan, as well as Afghan government and civilian targets.The group is also blamed for several deadly attacks against Indian interests in Afghanistan including the 2008 bombing of the Indian mission in Kabul that killed 58 people.

Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has gained a whopping 15 per cent national lead over her Republican rival Donald Trump, according to a latest poll.Due to the recent gaffes made by Mr. Trump after the conclusion of two back-to-back conventions last week, Ms. Clinton now has the support of 48 percent of the potential voters as against Mr. Trump’s 33 percent, a new McClatchy—Marist poll said.

The poll conducted by Marist Institute for Public Opinion in New York said last month Ms. Clinton’s lead was 42—39 advantage over Trump.“This is coming off the Democratic convention, where a bounce is expected,” Lee Miringoff, director of the institute said.In another poll released by The Wall Street Journal/NBC News, Ms. Clinton was shown at a lead of nine points over Mr. Trump.

In the previous NBC News/The Wall Street Journal poll, Ms. Clinton had an advantage of five percentage points over Mr. Trump.According to the latest poll, Ms. Clinton enjoys a significant advantage among women (51 percent to Trump’s 35 percent), African Americans (91 percent to 1 percent), all non-white voters (69 percent to 17 percent), young voters (46 percent to 34 percent), and white voters with a college degree (47 percent to 40 percent).

Mr. Trump leads among white voters (45 percent to Clinton’s 40 percent), seniors (46 percent to 43 percent), independents (36 percent to 32 percent) and white voters without a college degree (49 percent to 36 percent).The two candidates are running close among men at 43 percent for Ms. Clinton and 42 percent for Mr. Trump, the poll said.According to RealClearPolitics, which keeps track of all major national polls, Ms. Clinton’s average lead over Mr. Trump now stands at 6.8 percentage points.

President Barack Obama has said that the U.S. has decided to keep a large number of American troops in Afghanistan wipe out the Islamic State terror group in the country.“In Afghanistan, one of the reasons that I decided to largely maintain our current force posture was so that we could keep eliminating ISIL’s (ISIS) presence there,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday.“We delivered another blow last month when we took out a top ISIL leader in Afghanistan, Umar Khalifa,” he said.Recently Mr. Obama announced his intention to keep 8,500 American troops in Afghanistan till January next year as against the 5,500 decided earlier.

Mr. Obama said every time there is a terrorist attack he feels disappointment, because he would like to prevent all of them.“That’s true not just when the attacks are in Europe or in the United States. When you read stories about attacks in Lebanon, Iraq or Afghanistan, or distant parts of the world that don’t get as much attention, they get my attention,” he said.“Because that is somebody’s kid, somebody’s mom, somebody who is just going about his business and mindlessly, senselessly, this person was murdered. So I haven’t gotten numb to it. It bugs me whenever it happens, and wherever it happens,” he said replying to a question.

“We are constantly pushing ourselves to see are there additional ideas that we can deploy to defeat this threat,” he added.“Now, it is important that we recognise terrorism, as a tactic, has been around for a long time. If you look at the 1970’s, or the 1980’s, or the 1990’s, there was some terrorist activity somewhere in the world that was brutal,” Mr. Obama said.“As much as I would like to say that during my eight year presidency we could have eliminated terrorism completely, it is not surprising that it hasn’t happened, and I don’t expect that will happen under the watch of my successors,” he said.

The U.S. president said if the IS had not destroyed Al-Qaeda in the FATA (Pakistan), more Americans would have been killed and more attacks like 9/11 would have taken place.He said the U.S. has maintained vigilance, recognising those threats still remain, those aspirations in the minds of these folks still remain but it is much harder for them to carry out large scale attacks like that than it used to be.

“That, I think, points to the need for us to not just have a military strategy, not just have a traditional counterterrorism strategy that’s designed to bust up networks catch folks before they carry out their attacks, although those still are necessary and we have to be more and more sophisticated about how we carry those out. It still requires us to have much greater cooperation with our partners around the world,” Mr. Obama said.

He stressed on the need for the U.S. and its allies to do a better job in draining the ideology that is behind these attacks.“That right now is emanating largely out of the Middle East, and a very small fraction of the Muslim world,” he said
“A perversion of Islam that has taken root and has been turbo charged over the Internet and that is appealing to even folks who don’t necessarily know anything about Islam, and aren’t even practicing Islam in any serious way,” Mr. Obama said.

“But, they have all kinds of psychosis and latch onto this as some way of being important and magnifying themselves,” he said, adding it is tougher because that involves both changes in geopolitics in places like Syria.Mr. Obama said cultural changes are required in regions like the Middle East and North Africa that are going through generational changes and for that it is needed to think how do messages of hate reach the individuals and the ways in which we can intervene.

Malaysia acknowledged for the first time that one of the pilots of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had plotted a course on his home flight simulator to the southern Indian Ocean, where the missing jet is believed to have crashed.Australian officials overseeing the search for the plane last month said data recovered from Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s simulator included a flight path to the southern Indian Ocean. Malaysian officials at the time refused to confirm the findings.

‘Thousands of destination on it’

On Thursday, Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai told local journalists that the flight path was found on the simulator. He also cautioned there were “thousands” of destinations on the simulator and no evidence that Capt.Shah flew the plane in that area or deliberately crashed it. A recording of the news conference was made available to The Associated Press on Friday.

New York Magazine reported last month that an FBI analysis of the device showed Capt. Shah had conducted a simulated flight to the Southern Indian Ocean less than a month before the plane vanished along a similar route. The magazine cited the discovery as strong evidence that the disappearance was a premeditated act of mass murder-suicide at the hands of the captain.

“Until today, this theory is still under investigation. There is no evidence to prove that Captain Shah flew the plane into the southern Indian Ocean,” Mr. Liow said. “Yes, there is the simulator but the [route] was one of thousands to many parts of the world. We cannot just base on that to confirm [he did it].”

Uncontrolled ditching

Mr. Liow didn’t say when the Indian Ocean path was flown on the simulator. He stressed that international experts and Australian officials have agreed that the most likely scenario was “uncontrolled ditching” of the plane.Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Center, which is overseeing the search for the plane off Australia’s west coast, has also said that evidence of the route did not prove that Capt. Shah had planned to steer the plane off course and showed only “the possibility of planning” for such an event.

‘Pilot suicide a possibility’

Malaysia’s national police chief Khalid Abu Bakar has said investigations will not be conclusive until the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and a data recorder are recovered. He did not rule out a pilot suicide.Officials have been stymied in their efforts to explain why the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people veered so far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Theories have ranged from a deliberate murder-suicide plot by one of the pilots, to a hijacking, to a mechanical catastrophe. Similarly, search crews have been unable to find the main wreckage of the plane despite a sweeping underwater hunt of a remote stretch of ocean off Australia’s west coast.

Last month, officials from Malaysia, Australia and China announced that the underwater search will be suspended once the current search area has been completely scoured. Crews have fewer than 10,000 square kilometres (3,861 square miles) left to scan of the 120,000-square-kilometre (46,332-sq.-mile) search area, and should finish their sweep of the region by the end of the year.