The Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, said on Monday night that the United States ”war on terror” had failed to address core problems, and that the world was in consequence a far less safe place.
Musharraf, who took power in a coup in 1999, sees himself as close to the centre of the ”war on terror” because he has Afghanistan on his border.
Asked on Newsnight whether he thought it had made the world less safe, he said: ”Yes, absolutely.”
Although he is regarded as a close ally by Tony Blair, whom he met in Downing Street on Monday, and George Bush, whom he saw at the weekend in Washington, Musharraf is at odds with them over the consequences of their strategy.
He reiterated one of his central themes, that while he supports the need to strike at al-Qaeda militarily, the root causes of terrorism have to be addressed and the west has failed to do so.
He said: ”We are not addressing the core problems, so therefore we can never address it in its totality. We are fighting it in its immediate context, but we are not fighting it in its strategic, long-term context.”
He added: ”It is the political disputes and we need to resolve them, and also the issue of illiteracy and poverty. [These] combined are breeding grounds of extremism and terrorism.”
Earlier, over breakfast with British journalists and at a joint press conference with Blair, he said that Pakistan had broken al-Qaeda, most of whose members had fled over the border when the American forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001.
About 600 had been arrested and this had cleared the cities, and operations this year in Waziristan, in North-West Frontier province, had forced al-Qaeda out of the valleys and into the mountains.
The remnants were made up of Uzbeks and Chechens.
”We have broken the back of al-Qaeda in Pakistan and I say this with total conviction and authority, they are on the run,” he said.
”Their command and control structure is broken, their logistics bases have been smashed.”
The previous night he had admitted that the trail leading to the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had gone cold.
Asked on Newsnight whether support for Bin Laden among Pakistanis was one of the reasons why he had not yet been captured, Musharraf said: ”Well yes, I wouldn’t deny this fact, that because of whatever has happened this man has taken on the stature of a hero in a certain kind of people… especially in the extremists, and therefore he would have some abetters there, and that is the reality.”
He said that Bin Laden was still alive, but he had no idea where he was, though media speculation placed him somewhere along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. – Guardian Unlimited Â