With rulers like these who needs enemies to defame Pakistan: Imran

PTI chief blames 'political elite' of the country for recent threats and strained ties with the US

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan has said that US President Donald Trump’s decision to suspend Pakistan’s military assistance is ‘extremely unwarranted’.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Khan said Pakistan had the most interest in securing peace in Afghanistan, and it suffered most in the war against terrorism, sacrificing more than 70,000 people and bearing a loss of more than $100 billion.

“It is deeply humiliating and insulting for the people of Pakistan to be blamed for the failures of others,” he said.

 



“Unfortunately unwarranted threats and deliberate attempts to humiliate and insult the Pakistani nation is a consequence of political crookedness and hypocrisy of our ruling elite that never hesitated to back-scratch Americans for their petty gains,” Khan said.

“It is imperative to learn the [duplicity] of our ruling elite that compromised our security and foreign policy at various occasions and played a pivotal role in developing US rhetoric of threatening us,” he added.

The PTI chief also said that while ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif claimed himself to be a harbinger of peace, he told Saudi Arabia that his government would send Pakistan Army contingents to Yemen. However, the then army chief, Gen (retd) Raheel Sharif did not agree to the proposal.

He pointed out that Sharif had said yes to Saudi Arabia despite parliament's unanimous decision to block the deployment of Pakistani troops to Yemen.

Khan also raised doubts over the PML-N role in the movement for restoration of the judiciary back in 2007, saying that Shehbaz Sharif, the incumbent Punjab Chief Minister, had told America’s then principal officer in Lahore, Brian Hunt, that former chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry was ‘a problematic figure who could create issues for the PML-N itself’.



He said it was hard to believe that the mightiest military machine in Afghanistan had shifted the burden of its failure on Pakistan and accused it of harbouring terrorists which America itself had failed to deal with.

Blaming Pakistan for the US failures in Afghanistan was a travesty of justice and deeply humiliating for the people of Pakistan, he added.

“How can a handful of terrorists stop the US from winning the Afghan war?” he said. “That is how Cambodia was destroyed in the Vietnam War. They bombed Cambodia in which a million people died,” he added.

Khan, however, said the US decision of cutting aid to Pakistan was a ‘blessing in disguise’.

He criticised Sharif for his ‘threats’ to break his silence over ‘secret dealings’ during his four-year rule, saying that he should have done that while he was in power.

He also said the motive behind the government’s move to ‘amend’ the law on the Finality of Prophethood could now easily be understood after the US added the country to a watch list for minorities and religious freedom violations.

“Now we know on whose behest they amended the Khatm-e-Nabuwwat clause,” he remarked.

The world saw gross violations of human rights as well as infractions of religious minorities rights in India but the US would not dare put India on the same watch list, he said.