LONDON: Pakistan defence minister Khawaja Asif has admitted on Sky News that Pakistan harbours and funds terror organisations, saying that it has been “doing the West’s dirty work for decades”.
He also said the Pakistan-based terror groups are “not multiple organisations” but “one single organisation religiously organised with different faces”.
When asked by Sky’s Yalda Hakim on Thursday night whether he admitted Pakistan has a long history of backing, funding and training terror organisations, Asif replied: “We have been doing this dirty work for the USA for about three decades and for the West, including Britain. That was a mistake and we suffered for that. If we had not joined the war against the Soviet Union and the war after 9/11, Pakistan’s track record was unimpeachable.”
Asif said that his country would respond “in kind” to any attack by nuclear rival New Delhi in retaliation for Pahalgam and called on US President Donald Trump to “bring sanity to the situation”.
“We have already prepared for it — any eventuality that takes place. We will measure our response to whatever is initiated by India. If there is an all-out attack obviously there will be all-out war.”
He said terror groups in Pakistan were “used as proxies by the USA”, and earlier the same terror groups had been treated like VIPs in Washington. “When we were fighting the war on their side in the ’80s against the Soviet Union, all these terrorists of today, they were wining and dining in Washington. Then came 9/11. Again the same situation was created. I think our govt then made a mistake.”
Asif claimed that Pakistan was not involved in the deadly attack in Pahalgam and that India “staged it” to “create some sort of crisis in the region, particularly for us”. “It was staged in Pulwama too,” he alleged.
“They never come up with any evidence for these incidents in Kashmir. They just blame Pakistan and create a situation for their own advantage — it doesn’t mean Pakistan was behind it because Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) had some linkages to Pakistan in the past. We had nothing to do with it. LeT does not exist in Pakistan anymore. It is extinct,” he claimed.
“When President Clinton was there, there was a terror attack on Sikhs and it was blamed on some never-heard-of terror organisation. This time again the people who are being accused are not known and it is an organisation we have never heard of,” he said referring to The Resistance Front (TRF) who have claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam attack.
When confronted that TRF was an offshoot of LeT, Asif said: “If the parent organisation does not exist, how can the offshoot take birth?