India was responsible for training and funding extremist groups that were waging a war against the state of Pakistan, Umar Khan Alisherzai, Pakistani Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, said during a meeting with his American counterpart least year.
The comments by Mr. Alisherzai were made publicly available by WikiLeaks, the whistleblower website that rocked the United States State Department this week since it began publishing some 250,000 private cables between U.S. diplomats in Washington and across the world.
The cable, dated October 26 2009 and sent from the U.S. embassy in Riyadh to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, quoted the Pakistani Ambassador as saying that India had also supported the Taliban in Pakistan, “They (India) will never let a chance to harm Pakistan go.”
The U.S. official recording the conversation went on to note that Mr. Alisherzai summed up his feelings about India by saying, “We are not expecting anything good from them.”
The official also stated in the cable that Mr. Alisherzai had offered some valuable insights into the relationship between intelligence and support provided by the local population in the Federally Administered Tribal Area region and the success of Pakistani military operations.
The U.S. official said that while Mr. Alisherzai’s suggestions on FATA and U.S. strategies to counter the growth of extremism in the region were “worth noting,” his insights on “larger regional issues (such as) Iran, India, and Saudi Arabia appear to be much more limited.”
Elaborating further on what the troubled border region of FATA needed to emerge from its current state of instability Mr. Alisherzai said that investment in education and development was the only way to help the tribal areas, and said that years of “bad luck” had redirected development funds from the tribal areas to the urban population centres.
