BERLIN, Dec 3: Pakistan’s foreign minister said here on Tuesday that western powers should fret less about Osama bin Laden and pay more attention to the root-causes of militancy, such as poverty.

“There is too much focus on the person of Osama,” Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri told Reuters during a visit to the German capital.

“What can help immensely is economic development. Extremism is engendered by poverty. So, if the West were to concentrate on economic development in the Third World and in the Muslim World, that would, to a very large extent, take care of that,” he said.

“See what happened in Europe after the Second World War: the Marshall Plan. It was able to take care of a large number of countries going the democratic way rather than the other way.”

Under the Plan, Washington poured money into a Europe devastated by World War Two to rebuild it and stave off the threat posed by communists supported by the then Soviet Union.

Kasuri said Osama, believed by western intelligence to be in the Pakistan-Afghan border region, was unlikely to be hiding in Pakistan, even though a recording of the Al Qaeda leader was released there last month.

“It is a pure matter of common sense. If a man wants you to believe he is in Pakistan and the whole world is after him, it’s a fair deduction to conclude that he is not in Pakistan,” Kasuri said. “It is not easy to hide yourself when there are 70,000 troops looking for you, with the help of American experts.”

“Osama is taller than most Pakistanis. He is six foot four inches. He would stand out.”

He said there are 15 to 20 US experts helping the 70,000 Pakistani soldiers search for Al Qaeda members inside Pakistani territory.

A top German intelligence official told a conference last week that Osama was likely to be hiding in Pakistan along the Afghan border. The FBI believes that many of its “Most Wanted Terrorists”, including Osama, are still in or very near Afghanistan, having evaded a massive international manhunt.

Nearly 8,000 US soldiers are among international coalition forces in Afghanistan hunting remnants of the Taliban and the Al Qaeda network, Washington’s prime suspects in the Sept 11 attacks.

The minister said it was unlikely that Al Qaeda was responsible for all recent attacks.

“It could be that there is more than one group that is involved,” Kasuri told Reuters. “But now it has become very convenient and probably fashionable from their point of view that they are all clubbed together.

“But there are activities taking place in the Philippines, in Palestine, all over. I don’t know if Al Qaeda is so well organised.”

In addition to addressing poverty, the West should seek to mediate long-festering disputes involving the Palestinians and Kashmiris, the Pakistani official said. Kasuri also called for greater economic cooperation from the United States, Germany and Japan, and said Washington should provide greater market access for Pakistani agriculture and textile goods.