Days after Pakistan defence minister Khawaja Asif admitted on Sky News that Pakistan harbours and funds terror organisations, saying that it has been “doing the West’s dirty work for decades”, an old video of Asif has surfaced online that purportedly shows him strongly criticising the Pakistan army
In the video, Asif — then in the opposition — is heard saying in the National Assembly: “We have spent hundreds, even thousands of billions of rupees and dollars on defence over the past 58 years. Yet what is the story of those years? 1948, 1965, 1971, 1984, and 1999 — if you gather the representatives of this country and investigate these five wars, anyone with even a shred of self-respect would bow their head in shame. Yet even today, they continue to demand a bloated defence budget with full impunity, beating their chests proudly.”
“They have sucked the marrow from the bones of this nation. Today, the nation lives in abject poverty. The people are ignorant, destitute, and poor. They do not even have access to clean drinking water — and when they do drink, they suffer from gastroenteritis, hepatitis A, B, and C,” he adds.
“As my brother Chaudhry Manzoor pointed out, there are separate books for the poor and different ones for the rich. The rich have different hospitals; the poor have different hospitals. If this is a welfare state, if Pakistan is truly a welfare state, then it is a welfare state only for Pakistan’s armed forces — not for the common people. If there is any guarantee, it is only for the education, health, luxuries, properties, plots, flats, and mansions of a select class. This select class has ruled this country for 43 years without any accountability. No one has ever questioned them: what did you build for this nation? What have you destroyed? The results are before us.”
‘Pak supported terror’
The video comes just days after, Asif admitted on Sky News that 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.”
