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Pak's Zardari gives India, World issue for a few decades
WSN Network 

Karachi/Islamabad: In remarks that will come back time and again to haunt the Pakistan establishment and which India will definitely tom tom now for years and decades, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has said militants and extremists were “deliberately created and nurtured” in the country as a policy to achieve “some shortterm tactical objectives”.

“Let us be truthful to ourselves and make a candid admission of the realities,” Zardari said on July 8. “The terrorists of today were the heroes of yesteryears until 9/11 occurred,” Zardari told former senior civil servants at the presidency on Tuesday night. “But these militants and extremists began to haunt the country in the post-9/11 era.

Militants emerged on the national scene and challenged the state not because the civil bureaucracy was weakened and demoralised, but because they were encouraged, the Pakistani president said.

Objective political observers have been repeating for years what Zardari said, but never before has a Pakistani president endorsed such views.

Zardari’s admission came days after he said in an interview that the Pakistani Army would even target militants it had backed in the past for use as a proxy force against India.

Political observers said Zardari’s comments are in line with previous statements made in the past couple of weeks by the Pakistan president. The remarks are clearly an overt attempt by Zardari to portray himself as the biggest democrat in Pakistan and his statements seem to be a way of preparing grounds to later say that he was removed becasue of his democratic notions and stance.

But many in Pakistan also view the statements as a bid by Zardari to make virtue of what is now well known, though he is guilty of not talking of the entire context in which such terrorism was nurtured.

15 July  2009
 

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