Ali.009
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If th US thought that it could bring pressure on Pakistan by lining up soldiers on the Pakistani border–that surely has backfired. The last thing America needs is another war on her hands. General Hamid Gul says that this would be the start of World War 3. The amassing of US troops near North Waziristan has elicited an unprecedented warning from General Kayani. General Kayani said the that US would have to think ten times before attacking Nuclear Armed Pakistan. He also said that Pakistan is not Iraq or Afghanistan
General Kayani has said that Pakistan doesn’t need US aid–a rebuff to US officials who think that the puny “aid’ can be leveraged to force the Pakistanis into working agianst their national interests.
Secretary of State Ms. Hillary Clinton is brining a dog and pony show to Islamabad–trying ot pressure the Pakistanis to attack the Haqqanis, or at least reign them in so that Washington can get a face-saving exit from the graveyard of empires. From the Pakistani perspective “the U.S. has been unable to defeat the Haqqanis on Afghan soil and says it does not have the resources to mount a full-scale attack in North Waziristan while it’s fighting militants elsewhere in the tribal regions”.
Tom Wright writing for the Wall Stree Journal accurately describes the situation “Pakistan clearly does not have the same strategic goals as the U.S. in Afghanistan. Its main aim there is to continue to maintain ties with whichever party controls the country after the U.S. leaves, allowing Islamabad to stop its rival India from exerting influence in Afghanistan.”
Kathy Gannon, Adam Goldman and Lolita Baldor writing for the Associated Press describe the purpose of the trip ”
In a muscular show of diplomatic force, the U.S. dispatched most of its senior national security leaders to Pakistan with what several officials described as a combined message of support and pressure”.
Ambassador Haqqani derisively called the “US Ambassador to Pakistan” termed ‘handling of two parallels narratives’ as the biggest challenge of the bilateral relationship. Haqqani said, the two countries need to come out of the current “event-dictated” mode of relations. Vice Presdient Joe Biden has often repeated the US needs to get out of the “transaction” based relationship and get into a strategic relationship with Pakistan. However the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan has thrown a hammer in the works.
It is evident that the Pakistanis will not launch a major offensive agianst North Waziristan or the Haqqanis. What will happen is the increased pressure will force the Pakistanis to go to the Haaqanis and say–”we dont’ want a war with America”–cool it for a while and give the US a face-saving-exit from their defeat.
While defending the oft repeated criticism against the Army, the General refuted the claims by Najam Sethi, Pervez Hoodboy and Ahmed Rashid.
Chief of Army Staff Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani rejected a perception that defence spending consumed a major portion of expenditures allocated in the budget. He also denied that defence spending had been increasing over the years.
Since 2007, he said, more than 140,000 armed forces personnel had been deployed along the Afghan border.
Gen Kayani said that in 2001 defence spending was 4.6 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product. But it had now declined to only 2.4 per cent of the GDP.
A parliamentarian who attended the briefing quoted the army chief as saying that about 50 per cent of the budget expenditures went to debt servicing and the Public Sector Development Programme. In contrast, only about 18 per cent of the total outlay was allocated to defence.
Gen Kayani said that up to 75 per cent of what was allocated to the defence services was spent on salary and rations of the personnel and just 25 per cent on “everything else”. According to him, Pakistan spends on three soldiers what India spends on only one soldier.
Organisations like the Army Welfare Trust and Fauji Foundation contributed billions of rupees to the national exchequer every year in the form of taxes, Gen Kayani said.
When asked why did his old friend and former US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen “stab him in the back” by levelling some serious allegations against Pakistan Army, he said: “Friendship does not matter in such issues.
“(Mike) Mullen did what he thought was in the interest of the United States and I will do what I think is in Pakistan’s interest.”
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