Islamabad: Claiming that India is being given space in Afghanistan's peace process at the cost of Pakistan, former military dictator Pervez Musharraf has said the US must realise that such a situation would be unacceptable for Islamabad.
"Any result of a peace process (in Afghanistan) in favour of India would not be acceptable to Pakistan and the US must understand this," said Musharraf, who currently lives in self-exile outside Pakistan.
Pakistan must use "all media sources, internal and external" to project the country's "interests and reasoning" in Afghanistan, the 68-year-old former president said in an appearance on a programme on Express 24/7 news channel.
Pakistan and the US should be on "the same page" on Afghanistan as any political instability in the war-torn country could lead to a repeat of the events that occurred in the 1990s following the fall of the Soviet Union, he said.
"If we have an unstable Afghanistan on the border, if the people of Afghanistan cannot handle the situation themselves (and) the coalition and the US (forces) leave as they have decided in 2014 and they leave a mess in Afghanistan, then that possibility of history repeating itself is very much possible," he said.
Referring to accusations by American officials that the Inter-Services Intelligence agency was waging a proxy war in Afghanistan, Musharraf claimed the US was using Pakistan as a scapegoat for its failures in the neighbouring country.
He described the allegations about the ISI supporting the Haqqani network as "irresponsible". The responsibility for dealing with the Haqqanis should be "equally shared" by Pakistan and the US, he said.
Pakistani forces should use whatever influence they have and tell the Haqqanis not to cross the border.
At the same time, US forces are responsible for controlling the Haqqanis on the Afghan side of the border, he added.
Musharraf said the blame game needs to stop so that Pakistan and the US could work against a common enemy.
The world needs to understand Pakistan's viewpoint and unless the US stops violating Pakistani interests, there could be no alliance between the two sides, he contended.
Doors for talks can never be closed, even with militant organisations, Musharraf said, noting that even the US has kept the door open for negotiations with the Haqqanis.
Musharraf claimed the way forward lay in talking to "peace-seeking Taliban". He pointed out that while not all Pashtuns were Taliban, all Taliban were Pashtuns.
"We need to identify the peace-seeking Taliban and hold reconciliatory talks with them," he said. Musharraf was of the opinion that Pakistan and Afghanistan need to talk to those Taliban factions that seek peace. However, this selective process had been dubbed by the US as a sort of double game, he claimed.
The former President rejected allegations that he had concluded a deal with the US administration during his regime to allow drone strikes in Pakistan.
He said Pakistan had only provided logistical support for unarmed drones.
"If there was an agreement between me and the US, why has the new government not gone ahead and broken this agreement?" he asked.
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