WASHINGTON, Feb 28: President Pervez Musharraf said his troops were aggressively hunting down the Al Qaeda terrorist group and Pakistan was doing all it could in the US-led war against terrorism and not focusing solely on capturing Osama bin Laden.
President Musharraf, in an interview with the United States television network ABC, dismissed information on Taliban leaders given to Pakistan by Afghanistan’s president as “ridiculous”.
The interview came ahead of US President George W. Bush’s Tuesday departure to South Asia, where he will visit India and Pakistan.
President Musharraf offered to fence and mine its border with Afghanistan to stem Taliban infiltration.
“I have been telling (Afghan President Hamid) Karzai and the United States, ‘Let us fence the border and let us mine it.’ Today I say it again. Let us mine their entire border. Let us fence it. It’s not difficult,” President Musharraf said.
Musharraf conceded that border security was a problem but said he was certain that Omar was not in Pakistan.
“Nobody denies that there is Taliban and al Qaeda activity here in our border,” Musharraf told ABC. But, he said, “certainly Mullah Omar is in Afghanistan.”
“I’m 200 percent sure he’s in Afghanistan. He’s living in his own area,” Musharraf said.
Asked if he was going after Osama aggressively enough, President Musharraf said: “We are not using the army only to track down Osama. I mean, this kind of a misperception should be removed. We are using the army against Al-Qaeda and Taliban.
“Now in the process, if you get word on him, very good. But we are not certainly focusing entirely only on tracking Osama bin Laden and (his number-two Ayman Al) Zawahiri,” he told ABC News in Pakistan.
President Musharraf said over 80,000 troops were fighting Al Qaeda terrorists and remnants of Taliban movement in Pakistan’s rugged mountainous border with Afghanistan. But he said it was unknown whether Osama was in Pakistan.
“Just five days back when president Karzai gives me a list of numbers, ridiculous kind of numbers that they are here and they are talking and we find that two-third is a waste of time,” President Musharraf said.
“Two-thirds of them are dead numbers and I’m quoting this with full authority,” he said. “Now the other one-third is, we are trying to track down these numbers.”—AFP