LONDON, July 10: Tehrik-i-Insaaf chief Imran Khan believes that the religious radicalism which has spread all over Pakistan in the last eight years of the military-led rule could be controlled and eliminated if tackled politically and in a democratic environment.

Answering a question after having made a presentation at the Foreign Press Association (FPA) on the Lal Masjid affair and the recently concluded MPC here, Imran said if Gen Pervez Musharraf had left the issue of Lal Masjid to the leaders of the ruling political party, the PML, they would not have let the matter degenerate into such a bloody standoff.

“I knew for a fact that some of the leaders of the PML had persuaded the Lal Masjid clerics to agree to a peaceful settlement of the issue, but the formula proposed by the PML leaders was shot down by the military authorities,” he alleged.

Recalling the launching of military operation in Balochistan during the early part of which Sardar Akbar Khan Bugti was killed, he said PML president Chaudhry Shujaat and its secretary-general Mushahid Hussain Sayed had come up with an agreed solution to resolving the issue, but this too was rejected by Gen Musharraf and now look how serious the insurgency there has become there.

He said, in the first place, Gen Musharraf should not have allowed so many armed militants to have gathered inside the mosque in those six months and then he should not have waited so long after the kidnapping of two policemen by the students of the Jamia Hafsa far back in February to launch an eviction programme through his party’s politicians.He thought Gen Musharraf had used the mosque issue to divert the attention of the people of Pakistan from the chief justice’s case which, he said, was going against the president and also from the two-day conference of the all opposition parties in London, “and at the same time he seemed to have successfully used the incident to persuade his friends in London and Washington to continue to support him rather than asking him to transfer power to a democratically elected government”.

He said the people of Pakistan by and large were against militancy and until the Americans started bombing Afghanistan they were all against terrorism that had taken a toll of so many innocent people on 9/11 in the US.

“But since then they have convinced themselves to believe that the US is waging a war against Islam. The invasion of Iraq had reinforced their belief. And they see Musharraf as a foot soldier of the US protecting the American interests in this part of the world. That is the reason why they look with suspicion everything he does. And that was the reason why his actions in Waziristan and against Lal Masjid did not win him many friends inside the country,” he contended.When asked what kind of relations he would have if he were elected prime minister, Imran said no one would like to be in a state of perpetual confrontation with the US. “But while maintaining good friendly relations with the US on equal footing one would also like to protect the interests of his own country which Gen Musharraf is perceived to have failed to do.”

He said the Waziristan issue could have been solved through political dialogue, but being a military man Musharraf sent in 80,000 troops on the behest of the US and within two years after having hundreds of troops killed he had to sign a ‘document of surrender’ with the Waziris, but in the process he has alienated the tribal people for many years to come.

He advised the US and the UK to go and read the histories of tribal areas and that of Afghanistan and pointed out that since Alexander nobody had been able to rule over these people. “You cannot kill people and still hope to win their hearts and minds. They would instead go over to the side of the Taliban. And that is why the Taliban movement has strengthened enormously in the last eight years. The warlords have returned to Afghanistan and the poppy production has risen to a level where it is supposed to be supplying 95 per cent of the drug to the world.”