September 18, 2008	Thursday	Ramazan 17, 1429

LONDON, Sept 17: A group of about 11 rich and influential countries is expected to meet in New York in the last week of this month to put together a proposal on the lines of the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Pakistan’s tribal areas and steer the country’s economic ship out of the stormy waters.

To be called Friends of Pakistan (FoP), the group would include all the G-8 countries plus China, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are believed to be engaged in mobilising the group and getting it to help Pakistan with a reconstruction budget aimed at revitalising everything from local transport to water supplies, funding employment schemes, comprehensively reforming local police and local governments, arranging adequate compensation for families whose near and dear ones have died in violence and also cover the medical expenses of the injured.

Pakistan’s High Commissioner in the UK Wajid Shamsul Hasan confirmed that the matter had come up in the discussions between President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Gordon Brown when they met here at 10 Downing Street on Tuesday. Mr Miliband was present at the meeting.

Mr Hasan said the president also discussed with the prime minister a proposal envisaging the formation of an inter-governmental counter-terrorist body to be known as ‘United Against Terrorism’ which would include Russia, China, Afghanistan, Iran and India.

The group would put together a unified action plan for meeting the challenge of terrorism which was threatening all the neighbours of Pakistan. The US and the UK would also be present but in the background, Mr Hasan said. According to him President Zardari has impressed upon the British leadership that consensus was necessary among the regional countries so that the war on terror is not considered an American war but is owned by all countries.

When asked about the response of the prime minister to this proposal, Mr Hasan said Mr Brown appeared to like the idea.

He also confirmed that Mr Zardari had offered to the British government to establish a special intelligence cell at the Pakistan High Commission in London which would act as a storehouse for information about militants and terror threats by monitoring British Pakistanis travelling between Pakistan and the UK.

Discussing the other aspects of the three-day visit of President Zardari to the UK, Mr Hasan described it as the ‘most austere’ ever to have been undertaken by a Pakistani president.

“You see he paid from his own pocket for the charter plane that took him and his daughter Bakhtawar to Edinburgh. And then we didn’t have to hire fleets of cars for the entourage because there was in fact no entourage at all and finally the president used commercial flights for his travel to and from London,” the High Commissioner said.

And he added jokingly that even his meals did not add to the hotel bill because they were delivered from the High Commissioner’s kitchen.