Islamabad sees Taliban as a threat to its security: Haqqani

[sparklingway]

Islamabad sees Taliban as a threat to its security: Haqqani​

Friday, July 09, 2010

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani said alongside military solutions there has to be a socio-economic and a political dimension to the challenges and threats posed by Taliban.

“We also believe, there is no purely military solution to the problem, that there also has to be a socio-economic and a political dimension to the problem,” Haqqani told correspondent Charles Recknagel in an interview during his visit to the RFE/RL in Prague.

He said there is no point in killing a few people and then those people being replaced by new recruits. “We have to make sure that the ability of the Taliban, in Afghanistan or Pakistan, to be able to continue to recruit people diminishes,” he added. When asked how does Pakistan regard - Afghan Taliban,

Pakistani Taliban and Punjabi Taliban, and the challenges they pose for the country, he said the government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, has consistently maintained that we consider all Taliban, whether their sphere of operations is Afghanistan or Pakistan, and other militant groups that are affiliated with or associated with the Taliban, a threat to our own security as well as to the security of our region and the world.

“So, we make no distinction. We judge them by their actions. Those that are engaged in terrorist actions, those that pursue the course of militancy, those that attack our army or the armies of our neighbours, in Afghanistan, and our allies, we consider them all a threat. The only question has been in what sequence should we deal with them militarily.”

Responding to another question, he said bringing any Afghan group to the table is for the Afghan government to decide. “Pakistan has made it clear that we consider the stability of Afghanistan as crucial to our policy objectives, we do not want Afghanistan to be used as terroristsí safe haven against us or against any other country in the world, and we, therefore, defer to the government of Afghanistan in making decisions as to whom they engage in reconciliation talks with,” he added.

About Taliban Movement of Pakistan (TTP) as a spill over from Afghan conflict, he replied: ìIt is a reflection of an ideological movement. They have a world view, they have been inspired by the Taliban in Afghanistan, but they have a world view of their own and their target has been Pakistan’s own military, intelligence services, and law enforcement services.î

He said in fact the very fact that these groups have attacked our military and our intelligence services with the vehemence with which they have conducted these attacks is evidence that the speculation about our military and our intelligence services as not being on board in fighting these people is totally erroneous and unfair.

Haqqani said: ìAs far as Pakistan’s objectives in relation to the TTP are concerned, our objective is essentially to pursue a “clear, hold, and transfer” policy in which we clear the areas that these groups have created as their sort of mini-states with military means, then hold them and then transfer them to civilian control so that they are part of Pakistan’s normal, social, political, and economic life.î

To yet another question, he said the government’s declared policy is one of gradual inclusion of the tribal areas into what is now known as the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, and the idea is that the people of the tribal areas should not be kept separate because that separateness has deprived them of schooling, of infrastructure, of economic opportunities.

The government and the international community has allocated vast resources now and as soon as peace is restored to a tribal area, one of the first things that is done is to start building new infrastructure, bringing clean water, roads, schools, he added.

He said the extremists in the form of the Taliban also oppose all of that because they see modernisation as a means of “losing autonomy,” but the truth is that any autonomy that is used primarily to deprive people of their fundamental rights and the fundamental opportunities that are available to a modern citizen of a country, that autonomy is not necessarily the best.

They should have rights under the Constitution, they should be part of the Pakistani populace as citizens and as equals, he added.

About the term “Punjab Taliban”, he explained that basically, the term is used for Taliban sympathisers from mainly the Punjab province, and these are members of various groups that have been set up or have been created over the years inspired by the Jihadist ideology that took root in our part of the world in the war against the Soviet Union from 1979 to 1989.

During that period a lot of Pakistanis also served as facilitators and subsequently people inspired by the call for global Jihad.Many of these groups have turned against the Pakistan government and they are targeting ordinary Pakistani citizens, they are trying to wage sectarian warfare in some parts of the country, he added.

Haqqani said there are all kinds of assorted groups and all of these groups have now come to light and the Pakistan government is determined to eliminate them in accordance with our legal framework and also to deprive them of the ability to wage the kind of terrorist attacks that they have carried out during the last few months.

Commenting on bringing militant groups from widely different areas of Pakistan together, he said these groups are brought together by their obscurantist philosophy, they all have a shared world view.

They think that modernisation and modernity are un-Islamic. They think that Pakistan should not be part of the modern world.

They also think that they somehow have a God-given right to determine how people will practice religion, they do not recognise the pluralism within Islam that has been practiced and recognised for centuries in our part of the world. He said the second thing that is bringing these groups together is that they are all targets of the efforts by the state of Pakistan to regain control of Pakistan.

 

[NWO]

I thought it was the Haqqani network operating within the Tribal regions that made this statement when I saw the title.