News
Thursday, May 24, 2007
It’s time for talks with Taliban: West should learn from us: Musharraf* President says Pakistan played no role in creating Taliban
Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: President General Pervez Musharraf said in an interview with The Globe and Mail that talks with the Taliban and other opposition may be necessary to bring stability to Afghanistan.
“We have to have a multipronged strategy. In Afghanistan it is only the military strategy which is working now,” Gen Musharraf said, adding that peace could not come from the barrel of a gun.
“[The] political element is the negotiations between warring factions. Who are the warring factions? Warring factions are the Afghan government and the coalition forces on one side and the militant Taliban and even non-Taliban ... so some form of negotiations between these two.”
“Maybe, there are groups who want to give up militancy and negotiate ... so I can’t lay down whether you negotiate with the Taliban, but [if] they want to go on fighting, you don’t negotiate with them, take a military angle. You negotiate, you develop contacts with people who are not for fighting.”
Gen Musharraf insisted that Pakistan was the only country that had a military, political, developmental and administrative strategy to defeat extremism.
“I would tell everyone: Come and learn from us. We are sitting here knowing exactly what is happening on ground,” he said. “You sitting in the West don’t know anything. So, don’t teach me, come and learn from us. Come and understand the environment. And then decide on what has to be done and what doesn’t have to be done. We are doing more than any other country in the world.”
The general also didn’t back down from controversial comments made last year comparing the casualties suffered by Canadians and Pakistani military. “Unfortunately the people in the West think that their lives are more important than our lives ... they think the gun fodder should be from these countries like Pakistan and developing countries. If their soldiers, one soldier, dies, there is a problem, but 500 of ours have died. And then, yet they are blaming us. Isn’t 500 important? ... And yet Pakistan is blamed for not doing enough.”
He defended the approach of reaching out to local power brokers as a way of breaking the cycle of violence, such as with the peace deal in North Waziristan. “These are the tribal maliks [leaders] and elders. Locate them. Identify them, deal with them, wean them away. That’s the strategy that should have been adopted a long time back, but we left the field open for the Taliban, so every one is now suppressed and they are scared. Either they have joined them or they are lying low.”
He insisted Pakistani intelligence agencies played no role in the creation of the Taliban, although he acknowledged Pakistan gave the extremists legitimacy by being among the only countries to establish diplomatic relations when Taliban mullahs took over the government of Afghanistan.
“I know for sure – 200 percent – that they were not a creation of Pakistan. They were a creation of circumstances in Afghanistan,” he said.
He admitted he was concerned about the growing domestic opposition to his government. He did not concede that he had mishandled the suspension of the chief justice, and saw himself as a victim of a larger conspiracy.
Courtesy DailyTimes.com.pk