News
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Don’t accuse us or you will lose an ally: KharISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Friday warned the United States that it could lose an ally if it continues to publicly accuse Islamabad of exporting violence to Afghanistan and being involved in attacks on US targets.
In the most stinging American indictment yet of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), top US military officer Admiral Mike Mullen accused the spy agency of involvement in two recent attacks on US interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan flatly denies sponsoring violence in Afghanistan. “We have also conveyed this to the United States, that you will lose an ally. You cannot afford to alienate Pakistan. You cannot afford to alienate the Pakistani people,” Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told a private news channel.
“If you are choosing to do so, and if they are choosing to do so, it will be at their own cost,” she said. Khar, who became foreign minister only two months ago and has attracted wide attention for her relative youth and stylish dressing, condemned the allegations as humiliating. “Anything which is said about an ally, about a partner publicly to recriminate it, to humiliate it, is not acceptable,” she told the Pakistani station in New York, where has been attending the UN General Assembly. Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday accused Pakistan of “exporting” violent extremism to Afghanistan through proxies and warned of possible action to protect American troops, without providing any details of either. He called the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network a “veritable arm” of the ISI, becoming the latest in a series of American leaders to demand that Pakistan take action against the network whose leadership is based in its tribal belt. agencies
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk