NEW DELHI: Hillary Clinton, Former American Secretary of State has said Pakistan needs to review its policy on cultivating certain non-state actors to provide what it considers strategic depth in Afghanistan and India because, Its like keeping poisonous snakes in your backyard expecting they will only bite your neighbour and what we are seeing now is the continuing threat to the state of Pakistan by these very same elements. The Pakistanis must also begin to have a different view of themselves in the future, she said, in an interview to Indian news channel NDTV.
Pointing out that its previous policy has been proved wrong, Clinton said, Pakistan now needs to focus all its strength on dealing with the militants.
Their idea, that they have these groups to provide strategic depth, as they like to say, vis-a-vis Afghanistan, or vis-a-vis India, I think if that were ever true, which I doubt, but if that were ever true, it no longer is, she said.
In the interview that focused on her new book, Hard Choices, Ms Clinton said that Pakistan also needed to make a hard choice now, disconnecting its ties to various terrorist groups and putting together all state powers to once and for all go after extremists, shut down their training camps, their safe havens, (and) madrasas that are inculcating suicide bombing behaviour.
Dawn reports that Ms Clinton said, she believed the Asif Zardari government did not know what the connections were between elements within the military and the ISI and various extremist and even terrorist groups. She also said that they were under the mistaken view that having these kinds of proxies vis-a-vis India, vis-a-vis Afghanistan were in Pakistans interests.
Clinton said that when she visited India after the Mumbai terror attacks, she was very struck by how the then government said it was very difficult to exercise restraint. I dont think any government could say anything differently.
She said when Sonia Gandhi and former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh conveyed the news of the Mumbai terror attacks to her, she told them: This is an element within the military intelligence institutional base, but that the civilian government was not involved. But I think that no country can turn away from that kind of attack continuously.
She noted that the terrorists now had moved deeper into Pakistan, attacking targets in major Pakistani cities. Weve just seen the attacks in Karachi. And I dont see how Pakistan can ignore this much longer.
Asked who she thought was responsible for the terror attacks, she said: We certainly never had any evidence that it went to the very top, but that may or may not be true.
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