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| April 26, 2007 | Thursday | Rabi-us-Sani 08, 1428 |
‘Pakistan indispensable in terror war’
LONDON, April 25: Pakistan’s High Commissioner to Britain Dr. Maleeha Lodhi told a UK Parliamentary Group that the international community should make up its mind whether it sees Pakistan as a “partner” or a “target”.
A press release issued by the Pakistan High Commission on Wednesday said that Dr. Lodhi had given an oral testimony to the All Party Parliamentary Group that had been set up to ‘tackle terrorism’.
The 18 member group’s meeting at the House of Commons was chaired by MP Khalid Mahmud and attended by 12 other MPs from both the Lords and the Commons.
This was the first oral evidence session in which two academics Paul Wilkinson and Keith Weston also testified.
Dr. Maleeha claimed that Pakistan was an “indispensable partner” in the global campaign against terrorism.
She said that terrorism should be tackled by getting “tough on terrorism” and “tough on the causes of terrorism”. She said that the divergent approaches of Western countries and the Muslim world towards the “root causes” had contributed to a “trust gap” among the partners in the international coalition against terrorism.
This must be bridged at both the official and people’s level to make the global effort more effective and sustained, the high commissioner said.
Dr Lodhi gave the parliament members a detailed exposition on Pakistan’s role in countering terrorism and extremism, arguing that while the two were related, they must be seen as analytically distinct issues that require different strategies.
While the terrorists had to be defeated, extremists had to be converted or marginalised, she added.
She said Pakistan’s security forces had successfully tracked and broken up to 10 international terrorist networks.
Besides police and military action, Pakistan is closely cooperating through intelligence sharing and curbing of terrorist finances in the fight against terrorism, she said.
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