David Miliband urged Pakistan’s political leaders yesterday to unite in the face of a “mortal threat” – not from India, but from the homegrown Islamist militants suspected of attacking Sri Lanka’s cricket team this week.
The Foreign Secretary also called on President Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, the opposition leader, to focus on combating extremism in the eastern province of Punjab, now the militants’ main recruiting ground.
“I think that the degree of political disunity that exists at the moment is only contributing to the problem,” he told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. “It is now vital that, whatever the political differences between President Zardari and Nawaz Sharif . . . they come together to unite against the mortal threat which Pakistan faces, which is a threat from its internal enemies, not its traditional external enemies.”
However, there was no sign of a let-up in squabbling as Mr Sharif held a rally of supporters in Lahore, the capital of Punjab, where the Sri Lanka team was attacked on Tuesday.
Mr Zardari is the widower of Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated former Prime Minister, and leads the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Mr Sharif is a former Prime Minister and head of the Pakistan Muslim League (N). They formed a coalition government after elections last year but that soon collapsed, principally because of a dispute over whether to reinstate judges deposed under the former President, Pervez Musharraf.
Their rivalry has flared into open political warfare since the Supreme Court disqualified Mr Sharif and his brother, Shahbaz, last week from taking part in elections, forcing Shahbaz to step down as Chief Minister of Punjab.
Mr Sharif has accused Mr Zardari of engineering that ruling to install a PPP figure as head of the Punjab government. Many opposition MPs also say that the transfer of power contributed to security lapses on Tuesday. Police sources told The Times that it led to the reshuffle of 12 senior police posts in Punjab last week, including that of the officer in charge of the Sri Lanka team’s security.
The Government is under enormous pressure to bring the attackers to justice amid widespread public perception, despite a complete lack of evidence, that India was to blame. “I cannot rule out a foreign hand in the incident,” Rehman Malik, the head of the Interior Ministry, told reporters yesterday.
Some Pakistani officials have said that Tuesday’s attack bore the hallmarks of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistani militant group blamed for the Mumbai attacks in November. Abdullah Ghaznavi, an LeT spokesman, denied that yesterday, saying that the group was focused on fighting Indian rule in Kashmir. “The attack is the handiwork of Indian agencies to defame Pakistan and bring instability to the country,” he said.
Security sources have told The Times that the investigation into Tuesday’s attack points to two other militant groups with close links to al Qaeda – Jaish-e-Mohammed and Laskhar-e-Janghvi.
In the past few years both groups have expanded their influence among the rural poor in southern Punjab, which is now Pakistan’s main centre of radical Islamic activities, according to the security sources.
Mr Miliband said that the Pakistani Government should focus on providing education and other public services that are delivered in some areas by militant groups such as LeT. Pakistan still spends more than twice as much on its armed forces as it does on education, forcing many parents to send their children to Islamic seminaries where they risk being indoctrinated by extremists, he said.
“You have a recipe for people seeking a better life for their kids turning to madrassas and turning to extremists,” he said.
Source:the times
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