All frenetic activity by Pakistan to conform with FATF recommendations is eyewash: Report

FATF will decide the fate of Pakistan with regard to listing in the last week of this month.

In a special report of the Center of Political and Foreign Affairs on 'Anti-Terrorism Task Force (CPFA)', Ronald Duchemin said: "The legal and regulatory changes, the convictions and sentencing of JuD leaders, the curbs placed on fund collection by terror groups, are all only on paper."

"At best they have had an impact on the margins. But in substantive terms, neither have the terror organisations been disbanded and made defunct, nor has there been a strangulation of their funding," he wrote in the report.

"The cases against and conviction of top JuD leaders has not stopped the activities of the terror group. Even the top leaders are incarcerated only in name. They are able to meet and communicate with their cadres and associates and even direct the operations and take care of the administrative issues of their group. In the case of JeM, there isn’t even the elaborate pretence of taking action, as is happening in the case for JuD," he wrote.

"For the FATF to claim that Pakistan has made ‘significant progress on a number of action plan items’ is to ignore the fact that on ground it is pretty much business as usual. By FATF’s own standards, the actions taken by Pakistan are neither credible, nor irreversible, and they are certainly not sustainable," he wrote.

"Most of all, nothing that Pakistan has done can be remotely described as ‘dissuasive actions’ because the terror groups these actions were supposed to dissuade certainly show no signs of being dissuaded," he wrote in the report.

"Therefore, to allow Pakistan off the hook simply on the basis of actions on paper or the deception of convictions would tantamount to undermining the very purpose of FATF which is to curb terror finance and money laundering. It is not enough to ask countries subjected to enhanced monitoring to just tick the boxes without ensuring that the impact is visible on ground. To do that is to accept subterfuge and make deceit and dissemble acceptable," he said.