Zalmay Khalilzad is the former US envoy and now US ambassador to Afghanistan. Yesterday he more or less explicitly threatened a US invasion of Pakistan’s border regions if the country didn’t straighten up and fly right. As one might expect, the Pakistanis weren’t particularly pleased.
Pakistan’s information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, said up to 50 soldiers had been killed in an army offensive against suspected Islamic militants in northern Pakistan last month. “Our forces are fully capable of confronting terrorists … [and] have sacrificed their lives in fulfilling their pledge to combat terrorists,” he said.“The American ambassador is not aware of the realities on the ground. It is our principled stand that we will deal with terrorists on our homeland. They [the US government] should deal with them in Afghanistan.”
A foreign ministry spokesman, Jalil Abbas Jilani, called the ambassador’s comments “unwarranted and uncalled for”. “Perhaps ambassador Khalilzad is not aware of the position of his government on this subject, which greatly appreciated Pakistan’s efforts in eliminating and rooting [out] terrorist infrastructure and the Taliban elements.”
Mr Khalilzad told an American thinktank that exiled Taliban fighters and other Islamist militants finding refuge in northern Pakistan posed the greatest threat to the security of Afghanistan. “We cannot allow this problem to fester indefinitely,” he told a conference organised by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
“We have told the Pakistani leadership that either they must solve this problem or we will have to do it for ourselves.”
While I would enjoy the spectacle of Mr. “I didn’t mean me we” Khalizad leading the troops into battle, I think on the whole it’s a poor idea.
The state department issued a somewhat tepid disclaimer.
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edited because I got my quagmires momentarily mixed up.
