Musharraf urges negotiations with Taliban

CANADA: Western attempts to crush the Taliban with brute military force must be underpinned by diplomatic efforts to bring stability to Afghanistan, Pakistan’s president told a Canadian newspaper Wednesday.

“We have to have a multi-pronged strategy,” President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview with the Toronto-based Globe and Mail.

“In Afghanistan it is only the military strategy which is working now.”

“(The) political element is the negotiations between warring factions. Who are the warring factions? Warring factions are the Afghan government and the coalition forces on one side, and the militant Taliban and even non-Taliban,” he wrote, advocating “some form of negotiations between these two.”

“Maybe, there are groups who want to give up militancy and negotiate ... so I can’t lay down whether you negotiate with the Taliban, but (if) they want to go on fighting, you don’t negotiate with them, take a military angle. You negotiate, you develop contacts with people who are not for fighting.”

In the interview, Musharraf also rejected criticism that his country has not done enough to stem militants’ attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan.

“I would tell everyone: Come and learn from us. We are sitting here knowing exactly what is happening on ground,” he said.

“You sitting in the West don’t know anything. So, don’t teach me, come and learn from us. Come and understand the environment. And then decide on what has to be done and what doesn’t have to be done. We are doing more than any other country in the world.”

Musharraf also said he was preoccupied with growing protests at home after his suspension of the nation’s top judge and riots in the country’s largest city Karachi, and a stand-off between the government and Islamists holed up in an Islamabad mosque.

But he insisted he would not declare martial law to quell the violence, which he blamed on opposition parties, before October elections.

Meanwhile the United States stands by embattled President Musharraf but wants his regime to do more to quell Taliban and Al-Qaeda violence in Afghanistan, a top US official said Wednesday.

“Pakistan is a great friend of the United States. We have a very close relationship with President Musharraf,” Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns told the Heritage Foundation.

“We strongly supported President Musharraf and will continue to do so,” he said.

Burns said the US government hopes that in the border region, “further and stronger efforts can be made to make sure that terrorist groups are not using Pakistani soil to attack inside of Afghanistan.”

“But we have a good relationship with Pakistan. President Musharraf is a friend of our country,” he said.

Burns added: “We hope that there can be progress in building Pakistan’s own democracy over the months and years ahead.”

Despite a Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, the US official said the fundamentalist Islamic militia was “not winning.”

“We have taken the fight to them over the last 18 months, since the increase in Taliban attacks has been so evident, and the Taliban has lost nearly all of the encounters that it’s had with the United States, Afghan and NATO militaries.

“And the Afghan government is obviously dedicated to seeing its own authority remain in the country, and to seeing that of the Taliban reduced.”

Hawa, Washington, Thursday, AFP