Expert Q&A: Who is Hafiz Saeed and why the $10 million bounty?

For a clearer picture of who Mr. Saeed is, the Monitor talked with a noted scholar and author on the region.

2. Why did the US put the bounty on him now, years after Mumbai?

"The precise impetus for the bounty remains unclear. It’s certainly the case that the US has been more concerned about the potential threats LeT poses since Mumbai.

And it is possible additional evidence came to light that spurred this action. Specifically, some reports suggest that evidence collected from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound during the 2011 raid in which he was killed suggested he had been in touch with Saeed regularly. LeT’s precise relationship with Al Qaeda remains the subject of significant debate, but if true then this might have spurred the US government to take this action.

In some respects, the more important question is what the US hopes to accomplish. Given that Saeed is not difficult to locate, it is possible this was intended to signal the seriousness of US concerns to Pakistan and pressure it to rein in Saeed (and through him LeT) via a practice of naming and shaming. This decision also might have been taken in an attempt to put pressure on the group directly."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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