Ties with bad guys help get bad guys: Gen Petraeus
A four-star US general, while refusing to endorse a London School of Economics report which blames Pakistan for maintaining links with the Afghan Taliban, says that you have to have contact with bad guys to get intelligence on bad guys.
When at a congressional hearing on Thursday a lawmaker quoted from the report to support his claim that Pakistan had links to the Afghan Taliban, Gen David Petraeus said: Well, first of all, I dont want to imply that I would accept the London School of Economics study or the individual who wrote that for them, his conclusions in all respects.
A report released by the London School of Economics earlier this week claimed that support for the Afghan Taliban was official policy of the Inter-Services Intelligence.
Since then, experts have rejected the report as shoddy, based merely on interviews with Afghan intelligence officials who had their own reasons for implicating Pakistan.
Gen Petraeus, who as commander of the US Central Command oversees Americas war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, is the first senior US official to have publicly rejected the report as incorrect.
At two separate hearings at the US Senate and the House of Representatives this week he strongly defended Pakistans efforts to fight extremism.
When Martin Heinrich, a congressman from New Mexico, referred to the LSE report, Gen Petraeus expressed doubts about its authenticity and noted that links between Pakistani intelligence agencies and Afghans date back decades from when we used the ISI to build the Mujahideen, who were used to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
Although the US general acknowledged that some of those ties continue in various forms, he pointed out that such links were useful too.
Some of them, by the way, gathering intelligence
you have to have contact with bad guys to get intelligence on bad guys. And so its very important, I think, again, to try to have this kind of nuanced feel for what is really going on.
The Pakistanis, he said, also had carried out impressive counter-insurgency operations against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and their affiliates and in both settled and tribal areas.
They also were cooperating with the US in a variety of ways, which led to the killing of more than 12 out of an updated list of top 20 Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders during the last 18 months, he said.
I do believe that the Pakistanis the people, the leaders, the clerics, and the military all recognise that you cannot allow poisonous snakes to have a nest in your backyard, said the US general.
Even if the tacit agreement is that theyre going to bite the neighbours kids instead of yours, eventually they turn around and bite you and your kids.
Referring to a lawmaker who had questioned his use of the term Pakistani partners, Gen Petraeus stressed the need for a long-term commitment to Pakistan.
I think we have to continue what is slowly being seen by our Pakistani partners and I say that word with sincerity is as a sustained, substantial commitment. That is what theyre looking to see, he said.
There is history here. Three times before, including after Charlie Wilsons war, we left precipitously after and left them holding the bag, he added.
They have enormous challenges, not just in the security arena, but in the economic arena, social, political
and it is hugely important that we be seen as partners by them and seen to be working to help them.
Defining the US-Pakistan partnership in the war against terrorists, the general said: Theyre doing the fighting. Were doing the enabling, with equipping, with funding
some training, intelligence exchanges, and the rest of that.
The key in this equation, he added, was to build a strategic relationship.
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