Re: Pakistan ‘out to enslave Afghans’ K barks again!
Pakistani Politician Says Pakistan Backing Taliban
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/061215/ap/d8m1bh400.html
Pakistan must subject its intelligence agencies to parliamentary and legal controls to address suspicions they are supporting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, an opposition politician said.
Speaking at a conference on Pakistan-Afghan relations Thursday, government critics alleged that Pakistan was providing sanctuary to Taliban militants and had a policy to project Pakistan’s power inside Afghanistan.
“The issue is not whether people (militants) are going across the border, but whether they are going because of the government of Pakistan or despite the government of Pakistan,” said Farhatullah Babar, a former senator from the opposition Pakistan People’s Party.
“If there are allegations that people within the intelligence agencies have been acting as a state within a state when it comes to Afghanistan, we must bring the intelligence apparatus under some kind of law and parliamentary control,” he said.
Pakistan denies granting sanctuary to the Taliban, but is facing accusations from Afghan President Hamid Karzai that Islamabad is orchestrating the rebel movement _ concern shared by Western nations contributing to the overstretched NATO security force in Afghanistan. There’s also growing worries over a “Talibanization” of Pakistan’s border regions.
Pakistan announced Thursday it had arrested more than 500 suspected Taliban militants this year, but local experts at the conference claimed the military establishment had a dual policy of supporting the U.S.-led war on terrorism while also clandestinely backing the Taliban.
Afrasiab Khattak, a leader of the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party, said the alleged policy was creating a “fundamentalist volcano” in the Pashtun tribal belt.
Sen. Mushahid Hussain, a leader of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League party, responded that Pakistan’s former policy of “strategic depth” inside Afghanistan _ the reasoning for its backing of the Taliban in the 1990s _ had been “officially discarded.”
“It does not suit us in any way to have an unstable neighboring country,” said Hussain, who is also chair of Pakistan’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee.