Pak must stop training, funding militants for Jammu and Kashmir 'jihad': Editorial

Islamabad, Nov 11(ANI): Pakistan must abandon its active involvement in the training and funding of militants in Jammu and Kashmir for cordial relations with India, an editorial in a leading Pakistan newspaper has said.

The editorial in the Daily Times comes after a BBC report revealed that Pakistani intelligence agencies are "fully supporting and financing" terrorist groups in Jammu and Kashmir, and that the Pakistan government "is completely aware" about the involvement.

"We must abandon this militant adventurism we have embarked upon on many fronts and work hard on the process of dialogue leading to regional peace," the editorial said.

The editorial further said that the intelligence establishment has to learn to prioritize, and put the country first.

"Pakistan is in a state of increasing state failure. No institution seems salvageable and we are having trouble managing what little resources we have. To stake everything on a claim on Kashmir when we are hard put to it to manage our domestic affairs is increasingly too high risk to be continued with equanimity," the editorial said.

"India is progressing globally at breakneck speed and could eventually trigger an internal collapse in this country without firing a single shot, a la the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War," it added.

Earlier, in the BBC report, Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) leader Zahid Habib Sheikh had revealed Pakistan's Kashmir strategy.

Sheikh had said that Pakistan was supporting militancy in Jammu and Kashmir not for the sake of Kashmiris, but to keep India engaged in conflict, and to use the militants as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

"Pakistan has also turned what should be a nationalist cause, about human rights abuses by India, into a religious cause," Sheikh had said.

Sheikh's candid confession clearly indicates that Pakistani authorities are directly supporting militancy in the Kashmir region, something which the country vehemently denies.

The paper also quoted a 25-year-old engineering student-turned-militant as saying, "While I was at university, I started going to sermons given by preachers and, thank God, I joined a jihadi group. I went to a training camp with hundreds of others for three months. Now I'm ready to do whatever they ask me, to win all of Kashmir for Pakistan."

His mother told that she had thought that her son was going for Quranic teaching, but was horrified to find that he had, in fact, had militant training.

"He is a different person since he went to the training camp; the way he talks and dresses. They have brainwashed him," revealed the man's brother.

"If Pakistan wants to fight India, why doesn't it do it through its army, why does it have to use boys like my brother?" he added.

Pakistan's Foreign Affairs Ministry had however termed the report as baseless and malicious. (ANI)