Albright interview 1998:
QUESTION: Madam Secretary and Mr. Foreign Minister(pakistan), I was wondering if the two of you in your discussions made any headway on developing some sort of new plan or new ideas for solving the problems in Afghanistan? If you would both answer, I would appreciate it.
FOREIGN MINISTER GOHAR AYUB: We have been touch. The Special Representative of the UN Secretary General was here a few weeks back, Mr. Brahimi. He is proposing a meeting of six plus two -- the six immediate neighbors of Afghanistan, which are Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan. And the plus two are the Russian Federation and the United States. Two meetings have been held in New York.
I also attended one meeting that Mr. Brahimi had called in New York during the UN General Assembly session some weeks back in which the Iranian Foreign Minister was there, but the other foreign ministers had left New York by then. The proposals are before us. We would like to see them succeed.
We had proposed in Pakistan that there should be an embargo on arms flow into Afghanistan and the land borders be monitored by the UN and also that the airports should be monitored so that air flights do not come in. We are also in the process of being in contact with the Taliban through Mullah Rabbani and the Prime Minster is also in touch and the Foreign Ministry through the Afghan Cell in the Foreign Ministry with the Northern Alliance. Hopefully, we should be able to get some agreement for a broad-based government in Afghanistan, so that peace is restored. Unfortunately, there's a lot of weapons supply which continues this conflict and Afghanistan bleeds. We feel that once the cutoff is there or arms are reduced, there would be a stalemate situation in which the prospects for talks and a ceasefire would be much brighter.
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: I think that the Foreign Minister covered most of the subject, but let me just say that we all very much support the Brahimi formula that he described. We hope that all countries with influence will work to bring the fighting to an end and that it will be possible for there to be a government that includes all the parties. We talked at some length about the problems created for the region by the ongoing struggle in Afghanistan and the great concern that we all have for regional stability.
QUESTION: Madame Secretary, since the withdrawal of the Soviet troops, the U.S. interest in Afghanistan is decreasing. Currently the Taliban occupy three-fourths of Afghanistan and they enjoy the support of the majority of the Afghan people. Why the United States is not giving recognition to this government and why you are not playing an active role in bringing about peace in Afghanistan?
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: Let me say that I think that the role that we are playing has been described through the formula that the Foreign Minister talked about and let me say that we do not believe that the Taliban is in a position to occupy all of Afghanistan, that there are other parties that need to be recognized and that there needs to be a government that is composed of them. I think it is very clear why we are opposed to the Taliban because of the way, their approach, if I might call it that, to human rights, their despicable treatment of women and children and their general lack of respect for human dignity in a way that is more reminiscent of the past than of the future.
QUESTION: Madam Secretary, further to the west, we understand a U-2 flight may have been scheduled over Iraq this morning. Do you have any information on that?
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: I do not. I think UNSCOM is the one that schedules U-2 flights.
QUESTION: Madam, how do you envisage the technical implementation of the new US policy of greater engagement in South Asia in general, and Pakistan in particular?
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: Well, I think that our desire is to make very clear that the United States sees the region as being important to us and that each of the two countries is separately, individually important to us. We see developing relations across the board, where we are dealing with a lot of day-to-day issues. In terms of business, we would like to see a greater commercial relationship. We would like to be able to have a relationship which is based on the fact that we can fight terrorism together and one where we understand the importance of dealing with issues of non-proliferation. Generally, it has been our sense that too much of the time during the Cold War was spent in a zero-sum game as far as the subcontinent was concerned. We now would like to have a relationship with both of these countries based on their great importance to us.
QUESTION: A question for both of you please. Your two countries, together and individually, had a lot to do with the Afghan conflict. If you knew then what you know about what Afghanistan would be like, would there have been anything you would have done differently? Is there any sense of regret about some of the things that were done, the Stingers that were supplied, the training camps that were set up, the blind eye turned to drug smuggling?
FOREIGN MINISTER GOHAR AYUB: I understand what you are saying. As I mentioned, had Pakistan not stood up against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, with the support of the Western democracies and America, possibly, possibly, it is a strong possibility that the Baltic states and even the East European countries may still have had communist regimes. It was the roll back, because it was seen as what happened to America in Vietnam happened to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. They had heavy casualties, their forward movement to the warm waters was stemmed, the Stingers came in and played a very decisive role in bringing down Soviet aircraft and at that time Afghan aircraft with pilots trained by the Soviet Union, which forced economic deterioration in the Soviet Union, strains within the armed forces, particularly the army and air force. And we take pride in it because we staked our independence, we staked our territorial integrity and also sovereignty on resisting the Soviets in Afghanistan. They rolled back; they went back; the Soviet Union disintegrated.
But the problems of what happened in Afghanistan, the arms, the drugs, also various people who had come to fight this jihad in Afghanistan -- even from far away in Europe, North America, Africa, Central Asia, Iran and these other areas -- they are still hanging around in Afghanistan, in areas which are not within the constitutional jurisdiction of Pakistan. They do pose a threat. Let's say certain things possibly could have been controlled, like drugs or gun running, because today we have approximately 1.2 million illegal AK-47s unlicensed in Pakistan. And also heavy equipment which we have to mop up. That's where people get these weapons freely, very cheap, easily, for terrorism and for acts of dacoity, law and order, sectarian killings, etc. But we feel very confident in the fact that this so happened. However, we've been left in the lurch. We've been left holding the baby after all that has happened.
Many a time I tell the Eastern Europeans: you hardly murmured when the Soviets came there, because when the Soviet invasion came into Czechoslovakia, Poland or Hungary, they used to pride themselves on their cavalry charges and their industrial might, etc, but they hardly lasted five days or six days before the Soviet army occupied them. In Afghanistan, it went on for twelve years. Look at the people and the bravery of the Afghan people, underdeveloped, backward, illiterate or poor people, they fought the Soviet Union and drove them over the Oxus.
QUESTION: Madam Secretary, it is widely believed that the US has downgraded its emphasis on the question of human rights violations in the part of Kashmir controlled by India. Do you have any specific reasons for the same, and why has the US turned a blind eye to the Indians' unguarded missile, nuclear, chemical weapons program and its arms buildup, which is posing a threat to world peace, and will you take up this question with your hosts while you are in New Delhi?
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: First of all, I think that the United States has been very clear about the importance of human rights everywhere, and also in Kashmir. And I clearly will be discussing the issue of proliferation and the need for non- proliferation when I am in India and making quite clear to them, as I have here, the importance that the United States attaches to making sure that weapons of mass destruction or technologies are not transferred, that this is a common threat to all of us and that it is the responsibility of responsible nations in the world to do everything they can to limit the spread of nuclear weapons technologies and various other aspects of weapons of mass destruction.
That is one reason we are now working so hard to get Saddam Hussain to comply with Security Council resolutions so that we do not see the danger of weapons of mass destruction. We believe in compliance with Security Council resolutions. |
