Rawalpindi: Major General Asif Ghafoor, the director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), in an interview with Gulf News has said that the Pakistan Army has eliminated all terrorist sanctuaries from the country. He pointed out that the carefully planned and well executed military campaign to rid the country of the menace of terrorism did not come cheap. All this has come at a huge price. Besides cost in blood of over 750,000 Pakistanis, there has been a loss of more than $123 billion to the national exchequer.
Pakistan has fought a successful war against terrorism, a war which entered Pakistan through over two and half thousand kilometres scantily manned Pak-Afghan border when US-led coalition forces started military operations in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, he told the publication, reiterating, There are no more organised sanctuaries; for elimination of remaining disorganised scanty residual presence of militants, Operation Radd-ul-Fasaad, a largely intelligence-based operation, is in progress.
Major General Ghafoor added that to combat the threat of disorganised militant groups, as many as 200,000 soldiers had been posted along the border in Fata. There are no organised terrorists sanctuaries inside Pakistan anymore and Pakistan has repeatedly conveyed this stance to the US authorities and it maintains that it will do its utmost to combat terrorism, but it will not fight inside Afghanistan and neither will it do so within Pakistan.
On being asked if the Pakistan Army is still India focused, Asif Ghafoor said that threat from India is perpetual. India is busy in inciting unrest through terrorism using Afghan soil, he told Gulf News, mentioning Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian spy currently in Pakistan's custody as an example. So we are not having any let-up in safeguarding against Indian threat.
While threat remains from India, both in conventional and sub-conventional domain, our biggest challenge is to maintain this stability with the threat still residing inside Afghanistan coupled with economic difficulties. Having said that, Pakistan has a strong and combat-hardened professional standing armed forces ready to thwart and defeat any threat. We are a responsible nuclear power with over 200 millions resilient Pakistanis, said Major General Ghafoor.
With reference to the Kashmir dispute, Major General Ghafoor said that Pakistan's desire for peace should never be mistaken as its weakness. For a normalised Indo-Pak relationship, all issues including the core issue of Kashmir between the two nuclear countries need to be resolved. India needs to behave like a responsible country, stop atrocities on both sides of the Line of Control and also discontinue interference inside Pakistan through state-sponsored terrorism.
Commenting on the contentious deployment of Pakistan military personnel to Saudi Arabia, the ISPR spokesperson said that the contingent was there based on the Pak-Saudi bilateral cooperation that both countries have enjoyed since 1982. He told Gulf News that the Pakistani Army contingent is in no way part of the Islamic Force and neither is it deployed at the borders, adding that the military was in the Kingdom in a training and advisory capacity.
Posted by : Admin on Mar 18, 2018 07:58 PM
