WASHINGTON: The US focus on militants of the Islamic State (IS) group will not cause a rise in extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, says the State Department.

At a news briefing in Washington, the department’s deputy spokesperson Marie Harf disagreed with a suggestion that by focusing its attention on the IS group, the United States was ignoring equally important fights in places like Pakistan and Afghanistan.

She said the United States was able to shift some of its resources to Iraq and Syria to engage IS militants because it had “focused so much” on fighting Al Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan’s tribal areas and in Afghanistan.

She noted that “every single member” of the group that attacked the United States on Sept 11, 2001 had been taken off the battlefield, all “except for one person, Ayman al-Zawahiri”. The fighters who replaced them were “younger and less experienced”, she added.

“It doesn’t mean they’re not a threat and it doesn’t mean we’re not focused on it, but we certainly have put quite a bit of resources into that fight in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Ms Harf said.

The State Department official assured those who were worried about a possible resurgence of militancy in South Asia that the US troops now in Afghanistan were “very focused on counter-terrorism (and were) continuing every day to take the fight to the enemy”.

This focus on fighting the extremists, she added, would not be affected by increased US interests in Iraq and Syria.

“We have a number of resources at our disposal in the United States that we can use in a variety of fights. We certainly can do more than one thing at once,” she said.

The United States, she said, was also closely watching other terrorist groups wherever they popped up, whether it’s Yemen or Somalia, Iraq and Syria.

“We remain focused on ones we know exist and we know are concerning, including in Pakistan,” Ms Harf said.

Published in Dawn, September 17th, 2014