By Dipankar De Sarkar, IANS
London : Seventy percent of all terrorist incidents in Britain has their origin in Pakistan, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Monday.
Arguing for greater Western engagement in Afghanistan, Miliband said it was imperative to promote both security and development in that country, one of the poorest in the world, for the sake of Britain’s own security.
“Afghanistan will become a failed state if the international community pulled out,” Miliband told BBC.
Its ability to tackle terrorists will “come back” to Britain, he said.
Helping the Afghan government tackle Al Qaeda terrorists’ use of the 2,500-mile- border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, he said, “is absolutely central to our security”.
Their ability to use this border has had “devastating consequences in the UK”, he added.
The governments of Britain and the US – the two largest contributors of troops to Afghanistan – want their Western NATO allies to do more for Afghanistan.
Both have called upon Germany to put more troops on the ground and in difficult places in Afghanistan, but Miliband said Germany’s existing contribution had to be viewed in the context of its post-War history.
While all European countries needed to step up their contribution, Germany had sent troops abroad for the first time in 60 years, he said.
US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has been reported as saying that if other countries did not contribute to the mission it could eventually “destroy” NATO.
Gates warned against a two-tiered alliance of those “who are willing to fight and those who are not”.
Miliband also countered former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown’s assessment that Afghanistan had already collapsed.
Ashdown, whose bid to become UN envoy to Afghanistan was rejected by Afghan President Hamid Karzai last month, said Sunday: “I think Afghanistan is a failed state, I don’t think it is on the edge of it. The question is, are we on the edge of losing this battle?”
Miliband said although Afghanistan ranked 174 out of 178 countries in the list of the poorest, it had five million children in school – more than a third of them girls – and two-thirds of Afghans now had health care.
But, he admitted, “Security is a real problem. In the south especially, the government hasn’t had a presence in a long time.”
“Up to 2001 Afghanistan was the incubator for Al Qaeda”, with the Taleban government providing a safe haven for the terror network, he said.
“This is the fundamental reason why Afghanistan is different from other poor countries. There is a security requirement as well as a development requirement,” he added.