Asked when Pakistan might launch a crackdown on militant groups in the Punjab, Qureshi said some lower level militants had been picked up and some eliminated.
“I think some major incidents have taken place in Lahore and woken the Punjab government up,” Qureshi told Reuters in an interview at the end of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), in Istanbul. “I think they are coming out of the denial that they were living in.”
Suicide assaults on two Ahmadi places of worship in Lahore last month killed scores of people and outraged Pakistanis.
PML-N chief and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, was quoted in the media this weekend voicing solidarity with the Ahmadi minority sect by describing them as brothers.
The Punjab government has been criticised in the past for shirking any confrontation with militant groups. Several militant groups thrive in the impoverished, rural areas of Pakistan’s heartland.
While their roots lie in hatred for India and non-Sunni Muslim minorities, some have become more anti-western, and have turned their ire on Pakistan since it joined the US-led battle against the Taliban.
Qureshi said Pakistan’s next priority in the fight against the Taliban is the remote North Waziristan tribal region. The US regularly launches drone missile attacks in North Waziristan and has been anticipating a Pakistani offensive there since last year. Qureshi said the army was moving toward an offensive in North Waziristan in a “calculated fashion” after an earlier successful operation in South Waziristan. “Our next priority is going to be North Waziristan but we have to time our operations in line with our resources,” he said. Qureshi said Pakistan’s military successes in the tribal belt had forced some militant leaders to flee outside the Pakistan-Afghanistan theatre.
“Our information is that they have gone into different areas, Somalia, Yemen and other destinations,” he said. “The tribal belt is no longer the safe haven that it used to be.”
Asked whether India’s presence in Afghanistan was still worrying Pakistan, Qureshi said; “The security challenges that Afghanistan faces can be helped more by Pakistan than India can help them. So I think that an exaggerated presence would not be in order.”
“We have to spend time to bridge the trust gap,” Qureshi said.
Published in the Express Tribune, June 10th, 2010.
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