Terming terrorism in his country as a blowback from the “mistakes of the past”, Pakistan Defence Minister Khwaja Asif has accused the United States of using Islamabad strategically and then treating it as “worse than toilet paper”.
Asif was speaking in the Parliament, where he spelt out one of the biggest admissions in the country in the recent past. Invoking a Hilary Clinton speech, Asif said that the speech was a clear-cut admission of how we were used by the US.
“And then they left us like tissue paper, or to be more precise, like a piece of toilet paper,” Asif said. He termed Pakistan's realignment with Washington, after 1999, and its subsequent involvement in the two Afghan wars as “the biggest mistakes”.
Asif added that the terrorism Pakistan is battling today was a consequence of meddling in the Afghan wars on behalf of the United States.
“We became party to two wars that were fought on the Afghan soil. We did not participate in the two wars for the love of Islam. Dictators needed legitimacy and ties with a superpower. We should be very clear about one thing: it was not Jihad,” Asif told the Pakistani Parliament.
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He said that micro changes were made in the ethos of the country because a “made in America Jihad” was to be fought.
“We were disowned the first time, but we did not learn our lessons, and because a dictatorship was again looking for legitimacy in 1999, we set out on the same path again,” he said.
During his speech, Asif contested the Sept. 11 attacks of 2001 in the United States, asserting that the perpetrators of the crime were still unknown, and Afghanistan was not the perpetrator.
There were no Pashtos, Hazaras, or any other ethnic groups from Afghanistan involved in the attack.
Asif stressed that the need was to own the mistakes, admit them and make amends moving forward. “That is if we want to mend the mistakes we have committed in the past.”
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