 ISLAMABAD - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf called neighboring President Hamid Karzai oblivious to events in Afghanistan, stepping up a war of words between the two US allies in the “war on terror”.
Musharraf renewed a months-long row with Afghanistan over cooperation in the search for Osama bin Laden and remnant Taleban and Al Qaeda militants, just days after US President George W. Bush visited both countries. He said that a list which Afghan officials gave to Islamabad containing details of Taleban militants allegedly in Pakistan, including the regime’s fugitive leader Mullah Omar, was “nonsense”.
| "Pshaw! You call that a list! I got lists of enemies longer than that!" |
“There is a very, very deliberate attempt to malign Pakistan by some (Afghani) agents, and president Karzai is totally oblivious of what is happening in his own country,” Musharraf told CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer” on Sunday.
| "They're insulting our dignity! We'll burn their embassy! You watch us seethe!" |
AfghanistanÂ’s foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah last week told AFP of his concern that Islamabad was not following up on a list of Taleban rebels, which was handed over when Karzai visited Pakistan last month.
But military ruler Musharraf, who abandoned Pakistan’s support for the Taleban after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, said he was “totally disappointed” by the intelligence the Afghans had provided. “We’ve already gone through it, this list. Two-thirds of it is months old, and it is outdated, and there is nothing,” Musharraf said. “What there was, the telephone numbers that they are talking of, two-thirds of them are dead numbers, and even the CIA knows about it, because we are sharing all this information with them.
“The location that they are talking of Mullah Omar is nonsense. There’s nobody there.”
| "We called and asked. The guy said nobody was there! So stop complaining!" |
Musharraf also complained of a conspiracy against Pakistan within Karzai’s defence and intelligence departments, adding: “He better set that right.”
Afghan officials have repeatedly accused Pakistan of turning a blind eye to Taleban training facilities on Pakistani soil and also alleged that some circles in Pakistan support and finance Islamic radicals behind the insurgency in Afghanistan. “We have had it up to our turbans ears with this campaign to malign Pakistan,” a senior Pakistani official close to Musharraf told AFP on condition of anonymity. “We have provided sufficient evidence to President Bush what certain Afghan officials are doing to fund and supply arms to militants in Pakistan,” the official said.
| Oh yeah, just what Karzai wants to do with an unstable, fractious country with an insurgency: go next door and cause trouble. That makes sense. Not a lot of sense. Maybe sense in an Islamic way. |
“One Afghan commander in Jalalabad is sending arms into Pakistani areas, for example. As a result our soldiers are dying and their soldiers are dying too.”
| That's because the Taliban are on both sides of the border. |
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