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Dear Sir/Madam, This letter is in response to the allegations made by Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa in her tweets against Pakistani intellectuals working for think tanks in Washington DC, which were reproduced in The Times of India article of June 30th 2013, entitled ISI has infiltrated US thinktanks, Pak scholar says.

The Times of India chose to carry a story based on unsubstantiated but extreme allegations targeting respected scholars; and neither Dr. Siddiqa nor the editors have offered a single scrap of evidence for the vicious suggestion that our colleagues work for the Pakistani intelligence services. This is not the first time Dr. Siddiqa has made such accusations and these are not the only people to have faced such attacks. Dr. Siddiqas action is simply a disgraceful attempt to malign fellow experts with whom she disagrees.

This is only the most recent example of a disturbing trend in public debate where disagreement is dealt with by accusations of someone working for one intelligence agency or the other. Any such baseless insinuations against respected scholars not only harm the individuals concerned; they also undermine free and honest intellectual debate concerning Pakistan. We wish to state clearly that such behavior has no place in any civilized and democratic discourse, no matter who the people involved are.

We call on Dr Siddiqa immediately to retract and apologise for her statement and on Times of India to refrain from propagating such unsubstantiated mudslinging.

2 Yours sincerely, Dr. Anatol Lieven Kings College London Dr. Adil Najam Dr. Andrew Wilder United States Institute of Peace Ms. Safiya Aftab Dr. Walter Andersen Mr. Peter Bergen Amb. Wendy Chamberlin Dr. Stephen Cohen Mr. Steve Coll Ms. Sheila Fruman Mr. Ejaz Haider Mr. Yasser Latif Hamdani Dr. Emma Hooper Amb. Tauqir Hussain Mr. Zahid Hussain Dr. Ayesha Jalal Dr. Saba Khattak Lt. Gen (retd.) Talat Masood Amb. Cameron Munter Dr. Paula Newberg Dr. Rasul Baksh Rais Dr. Paolo Cotta Ramusino Dr. Hasan-Askari Rizvi Dr. Abid Suleri Dr. Marvin Weinbaum Dr. Anita Weiss Ms. Huma Yusuf Mr. Mosharraf Zaidi