LAHORE, Nov 8: Pakistan should withdraw the logistics support it has been extending for the last one month if the United States does not stop attacks on Afghanistan during the holy month of Ramazan, the Jamaat-i-Islami said on Thursday.

Talking to Dawn at his Mansoora office, Syed Munawwar Hasan, the acting JI amir, said President Pervez Musharraf should tell the US president at their meeting scheduled for Saturday that if the US did not stop military strikes during Ramazan, Pakistan would withdraw the cooperation it had been extending since Oct 7.

He said Gen Musharraf should also discuss with President Bush what the latter thought the US had achieved from four weeks of attacks and why the objectives had not been achieved despite devastating bombing.

The JI leader alleged that the real objective of the US campaign was to “create a new Israel” to control South East Asia. For this purpose, he said, there was the need to install a government in Afghanistan should to out US dictates.

The US, he said, had wanted to use occupied Kashmir for this purpose, but the situation had changed drastically after the Sept 11 incidents, and it had decided to use Afghanistan instead.

The JI leader alleged that what US was calling a war against terrorism was in fact a war against Islam. He said it was a crusade, as the US president had characterized it, notwithstanding the subsequent explanations to dilute the impression, and the Muslims would take it as such. The history, he hoped, would repeat itself and the Muslims would emerge victorious.

The JI leader said the US bent of mind was manifest from the fact that Palestinian children and poverty-stricken Afghans were being branded as terrorists while Jews using brute force against Palestinians and Hindus involved in genocide of the Kashmiris escaped its attention.

Mr Hasan said it was a gross miscalculation to expect that the situation would come under control with the elimination of Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar.

Osama, he emphasized, was now more than an individual. He had come to represent resistance to US imperialism. A dead Osama or Mullah Omar, he warned, could be even more dangerous for the US than alive.

The JI leader contested President Musharraf’s claim that only a small minority was opposed to his policies. He said according to a Gallup Pakistan survey conducted before the US-Afghanistan war, 64 per cent people did not like Gen Musharraf’s policies. His approval rating had nosedived after the Oct 7 attacks on Afghanistan and according to the latest survey 85 per cent people did not support the government’s pro-US policy.

He believed that the religious parties could launch a movement against the government even if other parties did not cooperate with them. He recalled that no mass movement in the past had taken off without religious parties’ participation.

The Friday strike would be a great success, he said, no matter what tactics the government used to thwart it.