“I urged Marty (Mullen’s successor) to remember the importance of Pakistan to all of this, to try and do a better job than I did with that vexing and yet vital relationship,” Mullen added in remarks… Our strategy is the right one. We must keep executing it.”
Mullen told CNN in an interview to be broadcast Sunday: “The worst case, for me, is to see Pakistan deteriorate and somehow get to a point where it’s being run by insurgents who are in the possession of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons technology, which would mean that that part of the world would continue to deteriorate and become much more dangerous.”
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said of the new Joint Chiefs chairman: “Marty’s strategic vision is the right one for this time of transition.”
The diplomatic flare-up has added to anti-American sentiment in a country where a poll in June showed that almost two-thirds of the population considered the United States an enemy.
Demonstrations by religious parties broke out in several Pakistani cities on Friday, just a day after political leaders joined in rejecting US accusations that Islamabad was supporting militants.
In Hyderabad, about 900 people from a religious group burned an effigy of US President Barack Obama and chanted ‘America is a murderer’. In Lahore, at least 800 people protested at the headquarters of the Jamaat Islami (JI), Pakistan’s biggest religious party. ‘Go, America, Go!’ rose from the angry crowd. Another protest by JI in Peshawar drew around 200 people. They walked a donkey over an American flag laid on the road, and chanted ‘America’s Graveyard - Waziristan, Waziristan’.
“The prevailing view in Pakistan is that because of our alignment with the US, our problems have increased,” said Talat Masood, a retired general and military analyst. “America’s view is the opposite: ‘Because you are not aligning yourself with us, your problems are increasing’. This is the whole dilemma at the moment,” he said.
Dozens of political parties emerged from a conference on Thursday to condemn Mullen’s accusations of state links to violent militants as ‘baseless allegations’. They also pledged to seek a political settlement with militants on both sides of the border.
A military official said the army, which has lost 6,500 troops in the 10 years since Pakistani allied with the US in the war on militancy following the Sept 11 attacks, supported this policy.
Earlier, obviously concerned over the unravelling US-Pakistan relationship and the angry bluster from Islamabad, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got into major diplomatic mode with the White House taking a similar cue to mollify the Pakistan that they were still an indispensable ally and imperative for the war on terror.
During two separate press stake-outs after her meetings with the Nigerian and Egyptian foreign ministers respectively, Clinton was attempting damage control when questions were thrown up about the US-Pakistan relationship, and even when pressed, refused to endorse the no-holds-barred statements by Mullen.
When pressed Clinton said, “I would urge people to look at the entirety of Admiral Mullen’s testimony. He did raise serious questions, which our government has raised with the Pakistanis about the continuing safe haven for terrorists that strike across the border in Afghanistan against Afghans, Americans, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation International Security Assistance Force troops, civilians working there, as well as within Pakistan,” she said.
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