Meeting with American journalists: Pakistan deserves better treatment in US media

Senator Mushahid Hussain says Pakistani people sacrificed much more than any other country.

ISLAMABAD:

Chairman of Senate Defence Committee, Senator Mushahid Hussain Syed has said that the Pakistani people showed resilience in the war against terrorism, sacrificing much more than any other country and Pakistan’s democratic transformation, with multiple power centres and political pluralism, deserves fair and better treatment in the US media.

He was talking to a delegation of American journalists, currently visiting Islamabad on the US-Pakistan Journalist Exchange Programme, offered by the East-West Center, Honolulu.



Senator Mushahid said that the problems faced by the US after 9/11 were due to wrong policies of Washington, particularly an ‘ideological foreign policy’ that included the unwarranted invasion and occupation of Iraq, the rejection of Saudi Arabia’s Middle East peace plan and placing Iran on the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, even though Tehran cooperated with the US both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Such wrong policies fuelled anti-Americanism, he added.

In the context of upcoming US/NATO forces withdrawal from Afghanistan, he stated that the biggest problem in US policy had been confusion and contradictions, as sometimes the United States requested Pakistan to arrange talks with the Afghan Taliban, while on other occasions, Washington wanted Pakistan “to take on the same Afghan Taliban,” adding “regrettably for the most part, American policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan had been outsourced to the generals in the Pentagon and the spooks in the CIA.”

Published in The Express Tribune, April 7^th, 2014.