Asking the US to scale down rhetoric and resume serious dialogues, President Asif Ali Zardari has said that the confrontation strategy is damaging the relationship between Pakistan and the United States.
“Democracy always favors dialogue over confrontation. So, too, in Pakistan, where the terrorists who threaten both our country and the United States have gained the most from the recent verbal assaults, America have made against Pakistan,” the president wrote in an article published in Washington Post.
The president said our motives were simple to provide employment to youth, to turn this demographic challenge into a dividend for democracy and pluralism, where the embrace of tolerance elbows out the lure of extremism, where jobs turn desolation into opportunity and empowerment, where plowshares take the place of guns, where women and minorities have a meaningful place in society.
He said it was shocking to know that when Pakistan was pounded by the ravages of globally driven climate change, in which millions of our citizens became homeless, we found that, instead of a dialogue with our closest strategic ally, we were spoken to instead of being heard.
“We are being battered by nature and by our friends. This has shocked a nation that is bearing the brunt of the terrorist whirlwind in the region. And why,” he said.
After the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, the world’s most powerful democracy compromised its fundamental values to accommodate a dictator in Pakistan, he said further adding that since then Pakistan had lost 30,000 innocent civilians and 5,000 military and police officers to the militant mind-set that the US government was now charging that we support, the president wrote.
He said, “When an ally is informed instead of being consulted, both suffer.”
“The sooner we stop shooting verbal arrows at each other and coordinate our resources against the advancing flag of fanaticism, the sooner we can restore stability to the land for which so much of humanity continues to sacrifice”, the president wrote further.
Talk to, not at, Pakistan: President
