Islamabad, Oct 2: Claiming that India is being given space in Afghanistan's peace process at the cost of Pakistan, former military dictator Pervez Musharraf has said the US must realise that such a situation would be unacceptable for Islamabad.
“Any result of a peace process (in Afghanistan) in favour of India would not be acceptable to Pakistan and the US must understand this,” said Musharraf, who currently lives in self-exile outside Pakistan.
Pakistan must use “all media sources, internal and external” to project the country's “interests and reasoning” in Afghanistan, the 68-year-old former president said in an appearance on a programme on Express 24/7 news channel. Pakistan and the US should be on “the same page” on Afghanistan as any political instability in the war-torn country could lead to a repeat of the events that occurred in the 1990s following the fall of the Soviet Union, he said.
“If we have an unstable Afghanistan on the border, if the people of Afghanistan cannot handle the situation themselves (and) the coalition and the US (forces) leave as they have decided in 2014 and they leave a mess in Afghanistan, then that possibility of history repeating itself is very much possible,” he said.
Referring to accusations by American officials that the Inter-Services Intelligence agency was waging a proxy war in Afghanistan, Musharraf claimed the US was using Pakistan as a scapegoat for its failures in the neighbouring country.
He described the allegations about the ISI supporting the Haqqani network as “irresponsible”. The responsibility for dealing with the Haqqanis should be “equally shared” by Pakistan and the US, he said. PTI
