US asks Pakistan to thoroughly investigate the terrorist attack on the Pathankot air force base and bring the perpetrators to justice. “The Pakistanis said they’re going to investigate, so we look forward to seeing the results of that investigation when it’s complete,” state department spokesperson John Kirby told reporters. “But as for how long it’s going to take and the scope of it, I think you need to be talking to folks in Islamabad about that,” he said.

When asked whether the US had reached out to Pakistan, after India has named the banned terror organisation Jaish-e-Muhammad JeM and its chief Maulana Masood Azhar as responsible for the Pathankot attack, Kirby said: “Of course, we’re talking to Pakistan about this”.

“The government of Pakistan itself has condemned this attack and made clear that they’re committed to investigate it. So let’s let them do that and let’s see where the investigation goes. We obviously would like to see it investigated too, as completely and as thoroughly as possible, so that we can better understand what happened,” Kirby said.

“The government of Pakistan has also said that they’re not going to discriminate between terrorist groups as part of its counterterrorism operations. Pakistan “knows well the threat of terrorism. It is a regional challenge that requires real regional solutions,” he added, “and we want Pakistan to be a part of those solutions.”

“The relationship with Pakistan is complicated, I get that. And we don’t always agree on everything,” he acknowledged. “And I can’t speak for how long it might take them to complete an investigation or the degree to which they intend to be transparent about it after they’ve completed it. And as for the Mumbai attackers, we’ve said and I’ll say it again today: We obviously want to see all the perpetrators brought to justice,” Kirby said.

“We know that that can take a long time. It took an awful long time to bring Osama bin Laden to justice, but we did. So it can be hard.” The US didn’t “have an independent assessment of who was behind this attack,” he said. “A, it just happened two days ago; B, it’s being investigated by the Pakistanis. They’ve condemned it, we condemned it,” Kirby repeated. “Let’s let their investigation move forward and we’ll see where it goes.”

“It’s not for us to ascribe a timeline to somebody else’s investigation,” Kirby said. “We’ll certainly defer to Pakistani authorities to determine their own timelines and their own deadlines.”

Asked if he believed the Pathankot attack was carried out to derail the peace process between India and Pakistan, Kirby said: “I have no idea what the motivation for that attack would be.”

By Premji