ISLAMABAD, July 24: Pakistan Muslim League Secretary-General and Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed on Tuesday strongly condemned US threats of incursion into Pakistan to attack “Al Qaeda bases” in Pakistan.

Talking to the media here, he said that Pakistan should not be blamed for failings and weaknesses of Nato and the US forces in Afghanistan, adding that as a frontline ally of the international campaign against terrorism, Pakistan had played a major role and sacrificed nearly 900 of its soldiers and officers in Fata besides deploying 85,000 troops in the area.

He said that there was a big gap between perception of policymakers in Washington and the popular perception in Pakistan. Here the people felt that Pakistan was already doing too much, sometimes even at the cost of domestic destabilisation while the view from Washington was that Pakistan was doing too little.

The PML leader said that the campaign against terrorism could not be won by military might alone and exclusive reliance on the use of force had proven to be counterproductive in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Already, he said, the view of the British military was different than that of the US military and that a report issued last week by the UK House of Commons Defence Committee had already accepted failure of Western policy in Afghanistan.

Mr Hussain said that any unilateral military action initiated by the US would be unacceptable and it would provoke a popular backlash among the people of Pakistan which would be detrimental not just to the interests of Pakistan but also to the national security interests of the United States.

He also urged the US to review and reassess its policy in the Muslim world so that the gap between its policies and the popular perceptions in the region was bridged.