By Arun Kumar, IANS.
Washington : Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has advocated putting more pressure on Pakistan as he fears it is preparing for a war against India by using US military aid given to them for fighting terrorists.
“The US needs to stay focused on Afghanistan and put more pressure on the Pakistanis,” he said in an interview telecast Thursday night, “agreeing completely” with interviewer Bill O’Reilly that “there’s no winning the Taliban war unless Pakistan cracks down on the guys that are in Pakistan.”
Asked how Islamabad could be pressurised, Obama said: “Well, for example, we are providing them military aid without having enough strings attached. So they’re using the military aid… that we use (sic) to Pakistan, they’re preparing for war against India.”
But this did not mean that if elected he would pull US out “and let the Islamic fundamentalists take them over” as suggested by O’Reilly. Instead, he was for the US giving Islamabad more targeted military aid while helping build democracy.
“No, no, no, no. What we say is, look, we’re going to provide them with additional military support targeted at terrorists, and we’re going to help build their democracy and provide the kinds of funding…,” Obama said.
The Democratic candidate did not agree that the US was already doing so. “That’s not what we’ve been doing. We’ve wasted $10 billion with (former president Pervez) Musharraf without holding him accountable for knocking out those safe havens.”
The US has alleged that the Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are using Pakistan’s tribal region along the border with Afghanistan as “safe havens”.
“And what I will do is, if we have (Osama) bin Laden in our sites we target him, and we knock him out,” Obama said, denying that he ever advocated an invasion of Pakistan to target the Al Qaeda leader said to be hiding somewhere in the region.
“We can’t have – nobody talked about a full-blown invasion of Pakistan. The simple point that I made was: we’ve got to put more pressure on Pakistan to do what they need to do,” he said.
While his Republican rival only spoke about following Osama bin Laden “to the gates of hell” he was for targeted action while persuading Islamabad to take a more aggressive approach in fighting the terrorists, the Democratic nominee said.
“Here’s the problem. John McCain loves to say, ‘I would follow him (bin Laden) to the gates of hell’. (But) What we can do is stay focused on Afghanistan and put more pressure on the Pakistanis,” Obama said.
Turning to national security, Obama said he “absolutely” agreed that the US was in “the middle of a war on terror” and its “enemy” was “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, a whole host of networks that are bent on attacking America, who have a distorted ideology, who have perverted the faith of Islam. So we have to go after them.”
Declining to club Iran with other terrorist groups but nevertheless describing it as “a major threat,” Obama said he would not take the military option off the table to prevent Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon as it would be a “game changer.”
“Iran is a major threat. Now, I don’t think that there is the same – they are not part of the same network,” he said. But, “it is unacceptable for Iran to possess a nuclear weapon. It would be a game changer, and I’ve said that repeatedly. I’ve also said I would never take a military option off the table.”
He, however, declined to spell out his plans about Iran. “Look, it is not appropriate for somebody, who is one of two people who could be the president of the United States, to start tipping their hand in terms of what their plans might be with respect to Iran.”
“It’s sufficient to say I would not take the military option off the table and that I will never hesitate to use our military force in order to protect the homeland and United States interests,” he said.
But he disagreed with “the notion that we’ve exhausted every other resource”, Obama said suggesting that the Bush administration had not done enough to work out, for instance, sanctions against Iran in concert with the Europeans.