By EuAsiaNews,
Brussels : U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said here Saturday that India’s role is critical in resolving the Afghanistan crisis.
“India, of course, is the great power of the region, the great emerging in an international context and its views, its role are a critical factor. And so we consult India closely every step of the way and on my first trip to the region I went to India,” Holbrooke told the ‘Brussels Forum.’
After the NATO summit (3-4 April) is over, Holbrooke said, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullin, and he will fly to the region and the Indians have invited us to come and visit them as part of that trip.
“They’re not part of the problem the way Pakistan is but they’re certainly a major factor in resolving,” he told the high-level meeting of influential North American and European political, corporate, and intellectual leaders.
“The actual people who pose a direct threat to the countries represented in this room, the people who planned 9/11, who killed Benazir Bhutto, who committed the atrocities in Mumbai, who were terrorising Swat, who probably were associated with the attack on the cricket team in Lahore, who are associated with daily outrages – they are not in Afghanistan. They’re in Pakistan. In the western so-called tribal areas, although it also extends down into Baluchistan,” said the U.S. official.
“And you can’t succeed in Afghanistan if you don’t solve the problem of western Pakistan,” he stressed.
The starting point for the new U.S. administration’s approach to the region is going to be to treat it as an integrated whole, a single theatre of war, with very different rules on each side of the border, he said.
“We must recognise that the heart of the threat to the United States, to the European Union, to Australia, to many other countries in the world including India and, I stress, including Pakistan itself, comes from western — the people in western Pakistan. When they take over Swat, they are less than 100 miles from the capital, Islamabad, and every Pakistani and many Indians I know in the educated classes goes — used to go to Swat for vacations,” noted Holbrooke.
On his part, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid said Pakistan is facing a huge political military crisis.
“You have the reluctance of the military to take on the Taliban — Pakistani Taliban, on its soil. There’s still an obsession with dealing with India. 80% of the army is deployed against India rather than against the threat that Ambassador Holbrooke spoke about,” he said.
Zalmai Rasoul, National Security Adviser of Afghanistan, said the “Quetta Shura is not fighting. The Quetta Shura is sitting.”
“The leadership of Taliban are there. The command and control is coming from there, the logistical support from there. So Pakistan should also fight, of course, against the terrorist but also stop or institutions in Pakistan stop the support to the Quetta Shura, which the leadership of the Taliban are sitting there ,” Rasoul said.
They were addressing the topic ‘Afghanistan and Pakistan, What will it take to get it right? ‘
The fourth Brussels Forum is organised by The German Marshall Fund of the United States , Belgium, the Czech Republic and Daimler.
Participants in the 3-day Forum which kicked off Friday evening include heads of state, senior officials from the European Union, U.S. Cabinet officials, Congressional representatives, parliamentarians, academics, and media.