ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s top foreign policy official warned on Friday that the country would continue to resist US pressure to roll back development of short-range “tactical” nuclear weapons in response to India’s defence strategy.
“If India keeps expanding its nuclear arsenal and other arsenal, Pakistan cannot stay quiet. It has to achieve adequate deterrence,” said Sartaj Aziz, the prime minister’s advisor on foreign affairs.
Speaking to foreign news agency Reuters in an interview, Aziz denied that Pakistan’s relations with the US were strained following the May 21 US drone strike that killed Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour and Congress’s blocking of financing for Pakistan to buy American F-16 fighter jets.
“I don’t see the relations are tense at the moment,” Aziz said.
“They are moving in the right direction and there are of course differences, but I don’t think there is any major crisis in the relationship.”
Aziz also defended against criticism from the US that Pakistan has not done enough in the war against terrorism.
The foreign affairs advisor said he would defend Pakistan’s record of fighting militants when meeting this weekend with a US congressional delegation headed by Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. “I think what we have achieved in these three years is quite remarkable,” he told Reuters, citing the ongoing military operation to destroy militant hideouts in North Waziristan near the Afghan border.
“But there are risks involved of how far we can go and in what sequence we should go and in what scale we should go.”
Sartaj said the military acted “without distinguishing between ‘good and bad’ Taliban” but suggested that seeking a large-scale crackdown on all at once would overstretch the armed forces and lead to more terrorist attacks.
“So we have to make sure that we move in a decisive way, but at a measured pace and according to our capacity, and ensuring that the blowback is manageable,” he said.-Agencies
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