ISLAMABAD: Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmad Mukhtar has said that
Pakistani troops will pull back from the Pak-Afghan border in reaction
to the suspension of nearly $800 million worth of US military aid.
Interviewing
to private TV channel, Mukhtar said that Pakistan would pull back
troops from the nearly 1,100 check posts set up along the Pak-Afghan
border. The defence minister said that $300 million of this aid
specifically goes to troops serving in this troubled region. At the
same time, this move will sabotage efforts against the Taliban and al
Qaeda in the region.
Mukhtar said “this money (US military aid)
is not for fighting the war, but is money that we have spent already.”
Mukhtar said that Pakistan could not afford to keep its military out in
the mountains or in the border areas for a long period of time. “The
next step would be that the government or the armed forces will pull
back the forces from the border areas,” he said.
Their fears
that the forces are being ambushed by tribal militants from across the
border, and, if this continues, there could be cross-border fighting,
he maintained.
The defence minister went on to say that the US,
by way of the UAE, had been allowed the use of the Shamsi air strip for
non-lethal weapons, such as unarmed drones and as a logistics support
site. “The understanding was that the drones would fly from Shamsi base
but only for surveillance they were not supposed to be lethal and the
next thing we knew they were using it for military attacks,” he said.
However, Mukhtar maintained that this was a problem that could be
resolved if both the US and Pakistan came to some arrangement.
The
defence minister also said that the government has asked American
military trainers to leave the country because they were seen to be
connected with Raymond Davis. He said that the government had asked
them to leave for because they broke the rules.
In his comments
on the American assertion that Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al Zawahiri was in
the tribal areas, Mukhtar said that he hoped the United States would
not repeat the mistakes it made in the raid to capture Osama Bin Laden.
This time round, he said, we hope the Americans will work with the
Pakistanis and share their intelligence. This falls in line with the
request by the Director-General Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR)
to share information with Pakistan. Online
