Salman Rushdie: Declare Pakistan a Terrorist State

In the days after the Abbottabad raid, Salman Rushdie said what diplomats were working overtime not to say: that Pakistan should be declared a terrorist state.

Rushdie's argument was blunt arithmetic. The world's most wanted terrorist had been living for years in a fortress-like compound in a military cantonment town, about a mile from Pakistan's elite military academy — and Pakistan's government claimed to know nothing about it. Either the country's intelligence services were complicit, or they were incompetent on a scale that should terrify everyone. Rushdie's point was that neither answer left Pakistan looking like a reliable ally.

The remark traveled fast because of who was saying it. Rushdie has spent decades as one of the most prominent public intellectuals to write about Pakistan's role in regional militancy, and his own history — the fatwa years — gave him standing to speak about state-supported extremism without hedging.

Washington, for its part, never went there. Declaring Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism would have unraveled the entire architecture of the Afghan war, the aid relationship, and the supply lines American forces depended on. So the administration kept its language careful while Pakistan's civilian government kept its explanations vague, and Rushdie's sentence hung in the air as the version of the question nobody official could afford to ask.