ISLAMABAD, March 9: President Pervez Musharraf said on Thursday that the issue of Kashmir was a bilateral matter involving Pakistan and India and neither party wanted it to become a trilateral or multilateral issue.
“We (Pakistan and India) are into a bilateral dialogue. We don’t want to make it trilateral or multilateral,” he told CNN-IBN in an interview.
President Musharraf was responding to a question about US President George W Bush’s recent remark that he would not facilitate the issue of Kashmir although he would continue to encourage the two countries to resolve it.
Mr Bush’s comments had come after President Musharraf told a joint press conference in Islamabad last week that he had requested the US leader to “remain involved in facilitating the resolution of all issues, including Kashmir”.
“Well, I didn’t go into the details of the words, but certainly when it is facilitate or encourage, I think it is one and the same thing,” President Musharraf told the TV channel.
“He (Bush) can only encourage or facilitate us. I see both of them to mean the same thing,” said the president.
On the status of the ongoing peace process between India and Pakistan, President Musharraf said that confidence-building measures (CBMs) were doing “reasonably well” but conceded that the “conflict resolution part” was not doing well.
“CBMs are not enough. We need to go onto the dialogue process, that’s what I have been saying ... I believe in a two-track effort and that is the conflict resolution part. The conflict resolution part is not doing well at all,” he said. —Online
OUR CORRESPONDENT ADDS: President Musharraf said that Pakistan had no plans to enter into an arms race in the region but promised to maintain its credible minimum defensive deterrence.
Inaugurating the Centres of Excellence of the National Engineering and Scientific Commission (Nescom), he said Pakistan needed to “safeguards its defence very jealously” but without entering into an arms race like others.
“To this end, we will continue to develop and equip our armed forces with conventional and unconventional weapons,” he added.
To maintain its strategy of credible minimum defensive deterrence, the president said, Pakistan would continue to achieve higher level of excellence in technologies aimed at attaining lethality and accuracy of weapon systems.
He said the establishment of Nescom by integration of NDC, PMO, AWC and MTC and coordination of all strategic commissions under the National Command Authority (NCA) had been very fruitful and had paid quick dividends. He said the commission had evolved a methodology to integrate different technologies to configure and design a weapon system.
Gen Musharraf said the design of Shaheen-I, Shaheen-II, Ghauri X-2 had made the nation proud. However, he said, the design of the cruise missile “Babur” had astounded the world. “It is truly a sophisticated weapon system which incorporates technologies which have, so far, been in the control of three or four most advanced nations of the world. It has all been done indigenously without outside assistance,” he said.
According to him, most of the country’s scientists and engineers had the potential of providing technical leadership in the future. “It all augers well for the future of science and technology in Pakistan. But a lot has been done but more has to be achieved by commissions like Nescom to earn a place amongst the scientifically advanced nations of the world.”
President Musharraf said the government had been generously allocating funds to meet the requirements of higher education and scientific research. He said it was necessary to generate highly competent manpower for the future. He said the approach of providing higher education up to the PhD level at the finest universities of the world was well conceived.
To promote science and technology, he said six universities of international level would be set up in the country with the assistance of world-class institutions of higher learning from Europe and Asia.
He said planning a post-doctoral research platform at the Centres of Excellence and the international interaction with the top scientists and engineers of the world through science and technology conferences at this campus would help generate competent manpower.
Gen Musharraf congratulated Dr Samar Mubarakmand and his team of scientists and the Strategic Planning Division for achieving an important milestone in a short period of time. He hoped that these Centres of Excellence would be able to take up greater technological challenges faced by the country and the campus would become a world class institution of higher learning in the field of science and technology.
Nescom chairman Dr Samar Mubarakmand said on the occasion that the vision behind the creation of Centres of Excellence was to bring on one campus the scattered design capabilities of four constituent organisations.
Another important objective of these centres, he said, is to generate high quality human resource, which could contribute to national growth in science and technology.
APP ADDS: The president emphasised the need for integrating higher education with the demands of industry and strategic development.
“Education has to be dovetailed with industry and we have to produce engineers and technicians,” he added.
In this regard, the president said, the government is in the process of establishing six universities with the assistance of Sweden, France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and South Korea.
The president said he had also talked to the leadership of the United States and China to help Pakistan establish such universities of excellence.
But at the same time, he said, the country also had to produce technicians. Keeping in view the importance of vocational training, he said that technical education had been taken away from the ministry of education and placed under a separate authority for exclusive focus.
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.