Ambassador Durrani Hits Back at Pakistan’s Critics

Washington, DC: Ambassador Mahmud Ali Durrani said in a CNN interview on Tuesday night that those criticizing Pakistan for not “doing more” are “keeping one eye shut and one open,” by singling out Pakistan and saying nothing about what is going on in Afghanistan.
He said everyone was “crying about North Waziristan,” unmindful of the fact that North Waziristan is a small area and “I do not think that the deal we signed with them has helped the extremists and the terrorists.”
Durrani insisted that there had been no growth in the number of foreigners in North Waziristan after the peace deal. He said those who had married locally, and those who had decided to lay down their arms, had been allowed to stay but their number was “in a couple of dozens”.
Asked why attacks from North Waziristan into Afghanistan after the signing of the deal had gone up by 300 percent, Durrani responded, “They shot up by 300 percent because you have no control in Afghanistan ... You don’t have enough people. The Taliban can go and come wherever they like, they can hide in many places; there is zero control.” The ambassador said about 200,000 people cross the Pak-Afghan border every day, and it is difficult to determine which man is a fighter and which is on his way to see his family.
He said some among them could be Taliban or Al Qaeda. “What you need to realize is that 90 percent of the problem is in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan. You just seem to refuse to accept that there is a problem in Afghanistan. Unless you resolve Afghanistan, you can turn Pakistan upside down, this fact will not go away,” he added.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------