President Obama has unfurled his government's policy on Afghanistan and his strategy is a declaration that the war against Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is now his war. As if to accentuate the gravity of the situation, a suicide bomber struck the tribal belt in a mosque during Friday prayers killing scores and maiming 170 worshippers. On March 30, a police training school in Lahore was laid siege by terrorists, claiming scores of lives. The brazen assaults may have been a coincidence, but underscore the danger to Pakistan. A lot has been written on the contents of Obama's strategic plan but the scarlet thread is his warning that the United States' patience was wearing thin after Washington provided more than $12 billion in aid to Islamabad over seven years only to see Al-Qaeda remain intact. "After years of mixed results, we will not and cannot provide a blank check," Obama said. "Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out Al-Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken, one way or another, when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets." On the eve of President Obama's speech, General Karl Eikenberry, the former commander of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and the Obama administration's nominee as the next US ambassador to Kabul informed a senate panel that the Pakistan army and the ISI have had a "very ambiguous relationship" with the Taliban over the last 15 years and some within the two institutions may still support them. The general claimed that the deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan was linked to "the sanctuaries that existed and do exist inside of Pakistan, with Al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies." Immediately following the Obama speech, three top US generals accused the ISI of helping Al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists while one of them held that this issue was also raised during the Pakistan Army chief's recent visit to Washington. US National Security Adviser General James Jones, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and head of the US Central Command, General David Petraeus, have urged the ISI to end its contacts with the militants. Their claims indicate a major change in US attitude towards the intelligence organisations. "Such unauthenticated reports are part of a malicious campaign to discredit and bring disrepute to our security organisations. We, therefore, reject the allegations levelled against our security organisations," the spokesman said. Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to the region who plans to visit Pakistan again next week for follow up talks on the new strategy, said of all issues, investigating the ISI was "the most important." Mr Holbrooke told PBS when asked if the ISI was assisting Al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists: "We cannot succeed if the two intelligence agencies (the CIA and ISI) are at each others' throat or don't trust each other and if the kind of collusion you referred to is factual." The main elements of Mr Obama's plan, with its more robust combat force, its emphasis on training, and its far-reaching goals, foreshadow an ambitious but risky and costly attempt to unify and stabilise Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mr Obama is unveiling his approach at a time when the conflict is worsening, the lives of the people are not visibly improving, and the intervention by American-led foreign powers is increasingly resented. President Obama has called on Congress to approve $1.5 billion in aid to Pakistan for each of the next five years, acknowledging that the costs are high and that there are many competing demands for spending at home, but that the security interests at stake cannot be put aside, and that Afghanistan cannot take second place to Iraq in military importance. Although Mr Obama's plans have been appreciated in NATO countries, and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has welcomed the new strategy, the policy is being viewed more for what it did not say from the Pakistani perspective. He did not mention the drone attacks, nor did he acknowledge that technically the mujahideen were a creation of the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the eighties. They were abandoned after the Soviet retreat and virtually turned into Frankensteins to threaten the region as well as the entire world. If they had been de-indoctrinated, they could have returned to normal lives. Thus the US owes it to Afghanistan and its people to rebuild their country. It also owes it to Pakistan, which has bent over backwards in its support of the global War on Terror and is not the monster clandestinely supporting the terrorists; rather it is a victim. A very glaring omission was any reference of the "K"-word (Kashmir) despite including India as a stakeholder in Afghanistan, although they do not share common borders. Any inclusion of India without resolving the Kashmir imbroglio will only add more fuel to the fire of animosity between India and Pakistan. The writer is a political and defence analyst