Pakistan lashed out at the U.S. for accusing the country’s most powerful intelligence agency of supporting extremist attacks against American troops in Afghanistan — the most serious allegations against Islamabad since the beginning of the Afghan war.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar dismissed the claims as mere allegations. She warned the U.S. that it risked losing Pakistan as an ally and could not afford to alienate the Pakistani government or its people.
«If they are choosing to do so, it will be at their own cost,» Khar told Geo TV on Thursday from New York City, where she is attending a U.N. General Assembly meeting. «Anything which is said about an ally, about a partner publicly to recriminate it, to humiliate it is not acceptable.»
Khar’s comments were first aired in Pakistan on Friday.
The foreign minister spoke following Congressional testimony by the top U.S. military officer about Pakistan.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency Thursday of supporting extremists’ planning and execution of the assault on the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan last week and a truck bomb that wounded 77 American soldiers days earlier.
Mullen insisted that the Haqqani insurgent network «acts as a veritable arm» of the ISI, undermining the uneasy U.S.-Pakistan relationship forged in the terror fight and endangering American troops in the almost 10-year-old war in Afghanistan.
Pakistan is «exporting violence» and threatening any success in Afghanistan, Mullen said.
«In choosing to use violent extremism as an instrument of policy, the government of Pakistan, and most especially the Pakistani army and ISI, jeopardizes not only the prospect of our strategic partnership but Pakistan’s opportunity to be a respected nation with legitimate regional influence,» Mullen said. «They may believe that by using these proxies, they are hedging their bets or redressing what they feel is an imbalance in regional power. But in reality, they have already lost that bet.»
Source: AP