US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz
said on Tuesday he favoured resuming training Pakistani
officers in US military academies as a way of increasing
US influence in the country’s armed forces and reducing
that of Islamic radicals.
“You don’t promote military
reform in a country like Pakistan by cutting off education
for Pakistani military officers here and pushing them
into the one alternative, which is the Islamic extremists,”
Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
“It’s not as though if we
leave them alone, nobody else will go out to recruit them,”
he added. “I think one of our problems in Pakistan
today is that for too long we deprived ourselves of one
of the most important instruments of influence in a country
where the military is one of the most important institutions,
and that is the contact between our military and their
military,” Wolfowitz said. The United States cut
off military assistance to Pakistan in 1990 following
the discovery of its programme to develop nuclear weapons.
He called President Pervez Musharraf “a
friend of the US”, adding that no leader had taken
greater risks, or faced more daunting challenges from
within and without.
Wolfowitz said the fight against terrorism
was “a borderless conflict” and the 9/11 commission
had identified three key front countries Afghanistan,
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to make an important start.
In his testimony before the Congressional
hearing on 9/11 report on ‘terrorist sanctuaries’,
Wolfowitz praised President Musharraf’s “extraordinary
courage” to smoke out terrorists from Pakistani
territory. “Our success in Afghanistan would not
have been possible without President Musharraf’s
decision to support us in the struggle against terrorism,”
he said. Wolfowitz said the US victory in Afghanistan
had strengthened President Musharraf’s position
in Pakistan. The recent arrests in Pakistan, he said had
been important in capturing terrorists who were currently
planning attacks against the United States. He said the
global nature of this conflict could be emphasised by
the fact that “we have driven terrorists out of
Afghanistan into Pakistan where they had been captured.
“It has also led to terrorists elsewhere in London
and Chicago,” he added.
He said that the Pentagon had urged Congress
to authorise 500 million dollars for building a network
of friendly militias around the world to purge terrorists
from “ungoverned areas”. He also warned Muslim
clerics against providing “ideological sanctuary”
to radicals.
Wolfowitz told House Armed Services Committee
that the money would be used “for training and equipping
local security forces - not just armies - to counter terrorism
and insurgencies”. No specific beneficiaries of
the programme were named, but US officials have repeatedly
expressed concern about Afghan-Pakistani border, Iraq,
the Caucasus, Africa and the Philippines. In his testimony,
Wolfowitz also suggested expanding the scope of the war
on terror by including into the list of its possible targets
radical Islamic clerics, who, in his words, provide “ideological
sanctuary” to terrorism. In addition, he called
for tightening control over international communication
networks. agencies
