President Asif Ali Zardari has called for international community to give $100 billion in grant for Pakistan’s stability and survival.
He cited the threat posed by militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the possible economic meltdown, asking world community to provide $100 billions in grant for Pakistan.
“I need your help, if we fall, if we can’t do it, you can’t do it,” President Zardari repeatedly said during an interview with a foreign magazine, published on Saturday.
In the interview, Zardari also called for a broader free trade agreement with India and said: “India has never been a threat to Pakistan. “I, for one, and our democratic government is not scared of Indian influence abroad,” he said.0
President Zardari termed the Hurriat leaders in occupied Kashmir as “terrorists”, adding that he had no objection to the India-US nuclear cooperation pact so long as Islamabad was treated “at par” with New Delhi.
“Why would we begrudge the largest democracy in the world getting friendly with one of the oldest democracies in the world?”
He “has a simple and powerful argument to make that the world cannot allow his government to fail not when it’s becoming increasingly plausible that Pakistan itself, with its stockpile of as many as 200 nuclear warheads, could be toppled by Al Qaeda and its allies”.
In asking the international community for infusion of $100 billion into Pakistan’s economy, Zardari was keen to insist that it not be described as aid. “Aid is proven through the researches of the World Bank to be bad for a country,” Zardari said. “I’m looking for temporary relief for my budgetary support and cash for my treasury which does not need to be spent by me.
“It is not something I want to spend. But it will stop the outflow of my capital every time there is a bomb, In this situation, how do I create capital confidence, how do I create businessmen’s confidence?”
On US-Pakistan differences to conduct the war on terror, President Zardari was anxious to downplay any differences with the US. “I am not going to fall for this position that it’s an unpopular thing to be an American friend. I am an American friend,” Zardari said time and again.
On the incident last month in which Pakistani troops allegedly fired at US aircraft, Zardari said: “It was merely an incident, and while incidents do happen, they are not important.” He acknowledged that the US was carrying out Predator missile strikes on Pakistani soil with his government’s consent. “We have an understanding, in the sense that we’re going after an enemy together.”
Zardari also conceded “the problem that had be devilled past efforts at US-Pakistani cooperation, particularly in intelligence sharing: the widely held suspicion that Pakistani intelligence services continue to cooperate with, and even arm, the Taliban.” “You know, you keep an uglier alternative around so that you may not be asked to leave,” he says in reference to charges that former president Pervez Musharraf was not sincere in fighting militancy.
Zardari hoped that with the intelligence problem out of the way, a new era of cooperation can open up with the US. “We want to be able to share US intelligence,” he said. “We need helicopters, we need night goggles, we need equipment of that sort.”
He said there was a need for precision and finesse in fighting militants, rather than large-scale military force. “My eventual concept is that we should be taking them on as they are, as criminals.”
Of Osama bin Laden, Zardari said: Osama Bin Laden and all other terrorists are enemies of Pakistan.
Referring to reports that Pakistan has deployed F-16s against militants in tribal areas in part because the army’s own troops have been routinely routed in ground fighting, he said: “Their problems aren’t simply tactical. What kind of a joke is this that I cannot pay my security personnel more than the Talibs are paying?”
“Those terrorists are paying their soldiers 10,000 rupees; I’m paying seven or six thousand rupees. “The effects of such a disparity are increasingly in evidence.