Pakistan on Tuesday urged the US to learn from past mistakes and reassure the people of Pakistan and neighboring countries that Washington has a “long-term vision” to stabilize the region.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, standing next to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, made the appeal as debate rages in Washington on a strategy for neighboring Afghanistan.
“The people of the region have to be reassured that the United States has a long-term vision, not just for Pakistan and Afghanistan, but the entire region,” Qureshi said.
“What we are looking for is a long-term commitment” from the Us, Qureshi told reporters, referring to military, economic and other forms of aid.
“Why do I say that? Because the people of the region have to be reassured that the United States has a long-term vision, not just for Pakistan and Afghanistan, but the entire region,” he said.
“The inconsistency of the past has to be kept in mind,” the foreign minister said. “And we have to build on learning from the mistakes of the past.
The US and other countries that backed Islamist fighters in their war to drive out the Soviet Union in the 1980s have been faulted for abandoning Afghanistan to chronic lawlessness and poverty.
The Islamist Taliban movement stepped into the breach in the 1990s, bringing with them their al-Qaeda allies who masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US and triggered an eight-year US military intervention.
The US must stay the course until, Qureshi said, there is “a peaceful, stable Afghanistan, a peaceful, stable region. Development, prosperity, growth.”
In an interview with CNN television, Qureshi said US troops must stay in Afghanistan even though it was up to US commanders to determine how many are sent, a CNN transcript showed.
US President Barack Obama is weighing whether to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan to stop a resurgent Taliban, even as he faces political and public pressure to reduce the military presence there.
Qureshi told CNN he believes “the relationship has qualitatively improved in the last one year” when asked if Washington has given Islamabad the military aid needed to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda along the border with Afghanistan.
Under US pressure, Pakistan launched a massive military offensive in recent months against the Taliban that had come close to the capital Islamabad.
Qureshi and Clinton hailed the importance of a five-year, US$7.5 billion package to build schools, roads and democratic institutions, aimed at checking a Taliban insurgency that has spread from Afghanistan.
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