On New Year’s Day, Donald Trump fulminated on Twitter that the United States had “foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!” Three days later, his administration announced it would suspend military aid to Pakistan on the grounds that the country’s government shelters and funds the very terrorist organizations that the aid money was designed to help Pakistan fight.

Previous administrations have delayed or reduced these funds for the same reason—this year they could amount to more than $1 billion—but the Trump administration says it’s cutting the money off completely unless Pakistan takes “decisive action.”

It’s a bold move. And the right one.

Unlike many other bold moves of the Trump administration, this one received only muted criticism. A New York Times op-ed titled “How Not to Engage with Pakistan,” for instance, didn’t dispute the essence of Trump’s allegation. Its author, Richard Olson, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan under President Obama, censured the administration mainly for making policy so openly. “Pakistan, like most countries,” Olson wrote, “reacts very badly to public attempts to force its hand.” That’s true, and Pakistan reacted very badly. The country’s foreign minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, said the two countries no longer have any alliance.

U.S. news coverage of the dispute employed bland, generalized language to describe Islamabad’s offenses. Pakistan’s government isn’t “cracking down on terrorist networks” and has failed to “rein in militants.” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert spoke of Pakistan’s need to “deny safe haven to or lawfully detain those terrorists and militants who threaten U.S. interests.”

All true, but it doesn’t convey the essence of what Pakistan has done for years—what Trump tweeted so succinctly if undiplomatically. The country doesn’t simply tolerate terrorist organizations or go after them with insufficient fervor; it actively funds and abets these groups for both nationalist and ideological reasons. As Tom Joscelyn and Bill Roggio of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have tirelessly documented, Pakistan zealously backs our enemies even as it takes our money.

Pakistan’s gravest concern is its far larger and wealthier rival, India. Since Partition established their borders in 1947, the two countries have gone to war four times, and each time Pakistan has suffered defeat. Pakistani leaders believe that in order to counter Indian influence, they must maintain alliances with radical Islamic terrorist groups that fear and loathe the Hindu nation as much as Pakistan does. By allying with such groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan not only keeps out Indian influence but also creates an anti-Indian “fallback” territory in the event of a fifth war.

This is the dominant strategic paradigm inside Pakistan’s military and its intelligence services. But it’s not their only reason for backing jihadist groups; there’s also the ideology itself. Many Pakistani national security officials, from low-ranking soldiers to senior leaders, share the Islamist ideology and actively encourage the country to support it.

Pakistan supplies the Taliban with arms and with territory for training camps. We know this because Taliban commanders have freely said so. Pakistan arms the al Qaeda-affiliated Haqqani network, responsible for many deadly attacks in Afghanistan. Although the Haqqani headquarters in Waziristan (on the Afghan border) is well known, and although the Pakistani military has conducted antiterrorist operations there many times, the group remains unmolested.

The Taliban’s central leadership committee—the Quetta Shura Council—is based in Quetta, Pakistan. Taliban leaders are essentially free to operate out of many urban centers in Pakistan. Lashkar-e-Taiba, responsible for appalling terrorist attacks in both India and Afghanistan, openly operates recruitment centers throughout Pakistan. It was Lashkar-e-Taiba that carried out the 2008 suicide attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people over the course of three days. As for al Qaeda itself, it’s no coincidence that Osama bin Laden’s compound was in Abbottabad—the home of Pakistan’s military academy.

The Trump administration’s policy change on military aid is intended to pressure Pakistan into confronting these and allied organizations. But withholding money, however sensible, isn’t enough. We will have to impose other and more severe penalties. This begins with naming and sanctioning Pakistani government officials and entities who support jihadist groups. Depending on the behavior of the Pakistani government, it might include a more fundamental change: formally designating Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism. There are four countries on the State Department’s list: Iran, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea. Those regimes have “repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism,” to use the State Department’s official language. Pakistan indisputably qualifies for inclusion.

Such a heavy step might lead Pakistan to deny the United States use of its territory for Afghan operations, which will require our forces to use the Russian-influenced territories to the north as bases of operation. But the region will not cease to be the globe’s jihadism nerve center until Pakistan ceases to see it as a tool of the state. A progressively tougher stance towards Pakistan’s terrorism backers will produce geopolitical benefits elsewhere, just as our weakness and naïveté encouraged the country flagrantly to disregard American interests in the first place. We may not be able to pry Pakistan from its paranoid dependency on jihadism, but we don’t have to fund it either.