The Indian belief that the disclosures by WikiLeaks will finally persuade the Americans to read the riot act to Pakistan is misplaced.
As US President Barack Obama has said, the expose has revealed nothing new. As such, all that the US is likely to say is Pakistan should do "more" to check terrorism. In any event, Washington is apparently more concerned about shooting the messenger for divulging state secrets than in calling Pakistan to account.
Before the WikiLeaks hit the headlines, the London School of Economics had also noted the close links between the infamous Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) of Pakistan and the Taliban. So did the French academic, Bernard-Henri Levy, while researching on his book, "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" on the murder of a Jewish American journalist by terrorists in Pakistan.
Yet, nothing demonstrated Washington's mollycoddling of Islamabad more than Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's observation that any terrorist attack of the kind which Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, tried to carry out in New York would have had "devastating consequences" for Pakistan if it had been successful.
Two aspects of this statement are worth noting. One is that Pakistan is lucky that the attack failed. The other is that the US is bothered only about direct attacks on it. If the Pakistan-based terrorists carry out such offensives elsewhere, as they did in Mumbai in November 2008, then the Americans will not do anything other than reprimand Pakistan for being naughty.
The same selective approach can be seen in state department spokesman P.J. Crowley's recent praise for the steps which Pakistan is supposedly taking against extremists "in the tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan" which pose a threat, according to him, to both Pakistan and Afghanistan as also to the US, Europe and "other parts of the world".
There is no direct mention of India or of India-specific terrorist groups against which the Pakistani establishment, notably ISI and the army, are loath to take any action.
While international diplomacy is known to work on the principle that every one for himself and devil take the hindmost, a significant fallout of 9/11 was the realisation that Islamic terrorism is a universal menace and that it would be extremely unwise to visualise it in segments.
However, if America continues to be less concerned about the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and other groups, which are regarded by ISI and the Pakistan Army as their "strategic assets" against India, the reason perhaps is the long history of US-Pakistan collaboration dating back to more than half a century.
It was evident even during the Cold War that Pakistan had reached out to America not because it was eager to assist it against communism, but to acquire arms on that pretext and thereby strengthen itself vis-