By IANS,
Islamabad : In the first candid admission of its kind by a Pakistani ruler, President Asif Ali Zardari has conceded that Islamabad “created and nurtured” terrorist elements “as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives”.
“The terrorists of today were the heroes of yesteryear until 9/11 (terrorist attack on America) brought things into a new light,” Zardari said in what he termed “a candid admission of the realities” in an interactive meeting with former bureaucrats at the presidency Tuesday night.
“Let us be truthful to ourselves and make a candid admission of the realities… Militancy and extremism emerged on the national scene and challenged the state not because the civil bureaucracy was weakened and demoralised, but because they were deliberately created and nurtured as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives,” Zardari maintained.
The admission comes a fortnight after the president, in an article in the Washington Post, accused the US of fomenting militancy in Pakistan.
“The West stood by as a democratically elected (Pakistani) government was toppled by a military dictatorship in the late ’70s. Because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the West used my nation as a blunt instrument of the Cold War. It empowered a Gen. Zia dictatorship that brutalized its people, decimated our political parties, murdered the prime minister who had founded Pakistan’s largest political party, and destroyed the press and civil society,” Zardari wrote in the article.
“And once the Soviets were defeated, the Americans took the next bus out of town, leaving behind a political vacuum that ultimately led to the Talibanization and radicalization of Afghanistan, the birth of Al-Qaeda and the current jihadist insurrection in Pakistan.”
“The heroin mafia, which arose as a consequence of the efforts to implode the Soviet Union, now takes in $5 billion a year, twice the budget of our army and police. This is the price Pakistan continues to pay,” Zardari wrote in the article headlined “The Frontier Against Terrorism”.
Zardari also noted that his wife and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was a victim of terrorism. Bhutto was killed in a gun and bomb attack Dec 27, 2007, as she left a political rally in the adjacent garrison town of Rawalpindi.
It was not immediately clear whether Zardari was referring to the terrorists operating along the eastern border with India in Jammu and Kashmir, or the Taliban with which it has been waging a relentless war in the northwest and along the border with Afghanistan.
India has long accused Pakistan of sponsoring terrorism in Kashmir by providing arms and ammunition, training and funds to the guerrillas who have been fighting a two-decade old separatist war in the state.
Zardari’s predecessor, military strongman Gen. Pervez Musharraf had often admitted to providing “moral support” to the “freedom fighters” in Kashmir, defiantly saying: “We will continue to do so.”
India has also accused the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) of staging the 26/11 Mumbai mayhem that claimed more than 170 lives, including those of 26 foreigners. Pakistan has belatedly admitted that part of the Mumbai conspiracy was planned on its soil.
The Mumbai attacks had prompted India to freeze the sub-continental peace process, saying it could resume only after Pakistan took tangible action against the perpetrators of the Mumbai carnage.
New Delhi also says the LeT staged the Dec 13, 2001, attack on the Indian parliament.
The Pakistan Army is currently engaged in winding down a bruising war with the Taliban in the northwestern Swat Valley, even as it has shifted focus to the militants operating in the South Waziristan region of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the border with Afghanistan.
Earlier, while shifting focus from seeing India as the foremost threat to the country towards the domestic danger posed by extremist groups, Zardari had said: “I don’t think anybody in the establishment supports them (militants) any more … I think everybody has become more wise than this.”
“Military operations are all across the board against any insurgent whether in Karachi, Lahore or … in any part of Pakistan,” he said in an interview to The Daily Telegraph.