By IANS,
New Delhi : The United States is “committed” to destroying and defeating all terror syndicates, including the “strong connectivity” that Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Al Qaeda have built, visiting US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Michele Flournoy said Tuesday.
Flournoy, who arrived here Monday after a visit to Pakistan, said India and the US have common interests in “fighting terrorism in all its forms”.
“We (India and the US) have a very strong shared interest in fighting terrorism in all its forms. We see a strong connection between the groups like LeT and Al Qaeda. This is the syndicate we are committed to combat in its entirety and I think we are strongly interested in building the cooperation that we have in this area,” she told reporters here.
Flournoy, however parried a question over the alleged support Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) provides to anti-India militant groups in that country as has been reinforced in the documents leaked by whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
“I am not here to talk about specifics of Pakistani entities,” she said, adding: “I don’t think there is a strong difference of view (between India and the US) in how we see the (terror) threat and (the need to) combating it.”
Flournoy, who met Defence Minister A.K. Antony, National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, Defence Secretary Pradeep Kumar and defence and foreign policy experts, said her visit had come at “a very important time in the US-India defence relationship”.
“Just in the past two months, numerous US officials have come to Delhi. I think this is a tangible demonstration of the priority that we give to this relationship,” Flournoy said.