Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations Hussain Haroon has said that the United States was responsible for the animosity that bred against it in the Muslim world.
Haroon said if the US wanted an end to attacks on its embassies, personnel and assets in foreign countries, it should stop interfering in the domestic political discourse of the Muslim world and should not provide legal covers to people propagating against the sacred totems of Islam. He said the US had lost favor amongst Pakistanis because it has based droning the country’s citizens on caprices of officers sitting in Pentagon, who deemed themselves above the covenants of International Law. Commenting on the state relations between Pakistan and US, he said the US should shun perceiving Pakistan as a client state and realize that Pakistan had the right to enhance relations with its neighbors. The ambassador said that Pakistan was neither a rogue state nor was it supporting anti-American elements. Haroon said, “If the government of Pakistan was acquiescent of what is happening in Pakistan, they wouldn’t be firing teargas and bullets at the protestors.” The ambassador said Pakistan wanted trade, not aid from the US.
He said the Pakistani government demanded preferential trade, as that enjoyed by Jordan and Egypt, adding that the US was pronouncing Pakistan a double agent in the Afghan war and this fact angered him, because the US was bent on portraying Pakistan as a scapegoat for its failures in Afghanistan. Commenting on a question regarding the American demand to gun down Haqqanis, he said, “It’s a punitive relationship, where if we do the right thing, we get rewarded; and, the moment we try to think for ourselves, we get banged over the head with a brick or a stone or a stick. I don’t think that is an equitable relationship.”
The ambassador also expressed his discontent over raiding of Osama’s compound in Abbottabad by US marines without prior consent from the Pakistani authorities. He alleged that the US was unnecessarily hyping up the case of Dr Shakil Afridi and propagating that he was under custody because he had blown the horn over Osama’s hideout. Haroon said Muslims, especially Pakistanis, had been friendly with the westerners and the animosity which was planted in the 1980s could be nullified if both sides were serious in putting aside past differences.