By Arun Kumar,IANS,
Washington : Calling Afghanistan as a “proxy war” between India and Pakistan, former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has accused New Delhi of “trying to create an anti-Pakistan Afghanistan”.
Hours after President Barack Obama Thursday asked its key ally to stop hedging its bets in Afghanistan and adopt a peaceful approach towards India, Musharraf said the United States needs to understand Pakistan’s “sensitivities” about Afghanistan’s relationship with India.
“In Afghanistan, there is some kind of a proxy conflict going on between Pakistan and India,” he said participating in the rolling panels at the Washington Ideas Forum at the Newseum here, ABC News reported.
“India is trying to create an anti-Pakistan Afghanistan,” Musharraf said suggesting that India has a vision of dominating the region and aims to “create a weak Pakistan”.
He complained that India has been training Afghan diplomats, soldiers and intelligence officers and that the training should stop.
Asked why recent polling in Pakistan holds the US in low esteem, Musharraf said that “historical past” has led to mistrust and antipathy against the United States at the people level in light of the US scale down in Afghanistan planned for 2014.
Musharraf said Osama bin Laden’s hiding in plain sight in Abbotabad was “a terrible thing” but it was “not complicity, it was a terrible case of negligence which must be explained by Pakistan”.
Musharraf said personal relationships with former president George Bush and the Secretary of State Colin Powell helped ease tensions.
“I wonder whether that exists now, that understanding, that mutual confidence,” he said. “Maybe it is not there and, therefore, yes, there is a total breakdown of confidence and that is what is harming the relationship.”
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])