Europe

Afghan War Is Being Lost, Pakistani President Says

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LONDON — On the eve of an official visit to Britain, Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, was quoted in a French newspaper on Tuesday as saying that coalition forces were losing the war in Afghanistan because they had “lost the battle to win hearts and minds” of Afghans, and that the Taliban’s success lay “in knowing how to wait” for NATO forces to withdraw.

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The interview in Le Monde appeared as Mr. Zardari headed for a four-day visit to Britain after talks in France, including a meeting at the Élysée Palace with President Nicolas Sarkozy, that officials on both sides described as harmonious.

But the Paris interview set the stage for what promised to be tense discussions between Mr. Zardari and his hosts in Britain, a country with deep historic, economic and cultural ties to Pakistan, and with a deep investment in the Afghan war, where Britain has the second-highest number of foreign troops after the United States.

“The international community, to which Pakistan belongs, is losing the war against the Taliban,” Mr. Zardari said in the Le Monde interview. “This is above all because we have lost the battle to win hearts and minds.”

On the Taliban, he struck an ambiguous chord, saying at one point that “they have no chance of regaining power, though their influence is growing,” and at another that their ability to be patient means “time is on their side.”

In a reference to President Obama’s decision to virtually triple American strength in Afghanistan over the past 18 months, to a current level of about 95,000, Mr. Zardari added: “Military reinforcements are only a small part of the response. To win the support of the Afghan people, we must bring them economic development, and prove that we can not only change their lives, but improve them.”

The Pakistan leader’s remarks were similar to what many skeptics on the war in Britain and the United States — as well senior officials and military commanders in both countries — have said, though his bluntness in expressing them as he headed for Britain, where popular support for the war is at a low ebb, was bound to stir controversy.

Inevitably, too, his remarks appeared set to deepen the gulf between Pakistan and Britain that opened last week after Prime Minister David Cameron, during a visit to India, accused Pakistan of duplicity — in Mr. Cameron’s words, looking “two ways” — in its relations with the Taliban.

Mr. Zardari, chosen as Pakistan’s president after the December 2007 assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, has faced bitter criticism from political opponents and others at home for continuing with his visits to France and Britain at a time of acute humanitarian crisis in Pakistan.

According to the United Nations, the worst floods in more than a century in tribal areas of northwest Pakistan abutting Afghanistan have killed more than 1,400 people and made hundreds of thousands of others homeless.

But officials in his traveling party have said the need to air differences with the new British government over the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s relations with the Taliban trumped the demands for his return to Islamabad. Commentators in Pakistan have suggested that Mr. Zardari, who heads a weak and increasingly unpopular government, might be hoping to recoup some political strength with a headline-catching confrontation with Mr. Cameron over his remarks in India about Pakistan’s ties with the Taliban.

At a recent forum in Bangalore, India, Mr. Cameron was asked about suggestions of a duplicitous policy by Pakistan toward the Taliban that The New York Times and other news organizations drew from a trove of 75,000 leaked United States military documents posted on the Internet earlier last week by the whistle-blower organization WikiLeaks.

These accounts suggested that Pakistan, while mounting military offensives against the Taliban in its own northwestern tribal areas, has continued to arm, train and finance the Taliban in Afghanistan through its military intelligence arm, Inter-Services Intelligence. It did so in part to ensure that any future Taliban government in Afghanistan would be friendly to Pakistan, the documents said.

In Bangalore, Mr. Cameron said the West “cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country,” meaning Pakistan, “is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror.” The remarks caused a furor in Pakistan, in part because they were made during a visit to India, Pakistan’s historic nemesis.

In Le Monde, Mr. Zardari offered his own rebuttal. “This is absurd,” he said. “There are no good Taliban with whom we could speak and bad Taliban whom we must fight. Pakistan and its people are the victims of terrorists. We are not simply defending our borders, we are fighting against terror and those who spread it.”

He noted that his wife, Ms. Bhutto, was a victim of a terrorist attack.

As for Mr. Cameron, Mr. Zardari said he would “look him in the eyes and explain to him that it is my country that is paying the highest price in his war, in terms of human lives,” a reference to the Pakistan troops killed in conflict with the Taliban, and civilians killed in scores of suicide attacks across Pakistan.

For his part, Mr. Cameron stood by his Bangalore remarks in a BBC radio interview on Tuesday, describing what he said in India as “a pretty clear and frank answer” to a question put to him at the forum, adding, “I don’t regret that at all.”

While Pakistan was “an important ally” of Britain’s, he said, “we have to work with them to close down the terror networks that are in Pakistan” which had “threatened innocent people all over the world.”

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