Responding to President Trump’s policy announcement on Afghanistan, PPP VP Senator Sherry Rehman on Tuesday said that it is both disturbing and disappointing to hear a repeat of Pakistan being pressured to do more to stabilise Afghanistan.
“After years of shouldering the heavy lift in Afghanistan and suffering the blowback of an earlier transformational war thirty years ago, Pakistan should not have had to hear recrimination as a non-NATO ally that has given unparalleled sacrifices, resources and national trauma to fight a joint battle against terrorism on Afghan border. There is a little mention of the cost Pakistan has incurred or the successes it continues to achieve in clearing terrorism from the region,” she stated.
“Attempt to isolate and unjustly treatment with Pakistan will only complicate the problem and lead to a dangerous sharpening of strategic fault lines,” observed Senator Rehman. “It will obviously be counterproductive for announced US goals to stabilise the region in cooperation with Afghanistan’s neighbours. Furthermore, it may redefine the notion of blowback.”
“As this new American policy beats the dead horse of Pakistani subversion in Afghanistan, it will surely be seen as unfair, and perhaps even an expedient cover for inconvenient truths: that Afghanistan has been a colossal failure of American imagination, objectives and power projection in the region,” she said.
“This policy and narrative continues to sequester Pakistan as a sole harbour for terror when its military and civilians give their lives fighting for space against violent extremism,” she emphasized. “This ostensible new policy is a reflection of the ongoing confusion in the American policy establishment on how to achieve its own constantly shifting and changing goal posts,” said Rehman
Senior PPP leader and former interior minister Senator Rehman Malik also expressed strong reservations over US President Donald Trump’ statement in which he has lambasted Pakistan.
Senator Malik said that such irresponsible threatening statement from none other than US President Donald Trump will harm our efforts and fight against terrorism. He said he, as the interior minister of Pakistan in 2012, had proposed to United States of America to formulate a common counter strategy against the common enemy -terrorists, adding that he had proposed it in a meeting with Secretary State Condoleezza Rice and later in meeting with Marc Grossman US Special Secretary to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Unfortunately US couldn’t give a common counterterrorism strategy and now to hide its own failure in Afghanistan, it was blaming Pakistan, he said.
He asked the US president that who turned Afghanistan into a war zone and a threat to the region and world’s peace, certainly Trump knew making of Taliban, Al-Qaeda and then ISIS. ‘Everyone knows that war between US and Soviet Union converted Afghanistan into a war zone and hotbed for terrorists’, he added.
Senator Rehman Malik said that now it was Pakistan’s turn to ask USA to ‘do more’ as Afghan soil was being used for terrorist acts inside Pakistan. He said that Indian agency RAW was abetting and financing terrorists in Afghanistan to operate inside Pakistan yet US was siding with India against Pakistan.
He said that Pakistan’s PM should immediately call an All Parties Conference on the recent anti-Pakistan statement of President Donald Trump to formulate the counterterrorism strategy meanwhile he added that it was time for parliament to play its role too.
He said that the present government has failed in lobbying for Pakistan in US while on the other hand Indian lobby was working effectively against Pakistan. ‘As a nation we need unity against the internal and external threats to our motherland’, he advised.