 (Xinhua) -- Terrorism is spawned by al-Qaeda, foreign terrorists and some elements of Taliban, and Pakistan must get rid of them, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said on Thursday.
| Like you're doing with the Mehsuds, Perv? |
Musharraf made the remarks at a TV program at the President's House here on Thursday. Although the army was mainly for meeting the external threats
| ... and not very good at that... |
but it was also the duty of the army to counter the internal threats, Musharraf said.
| Barring the establishment of a competent internal security force. But the army's no great shakes, either. |
He added that the army could be withdrawn from Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) if there was an assurance that all foreign terrorists would leave the area and there was a complete end to militancy.
| If you exercise sovreignty over the country, the army is garrisoned where you need to put it, not withdrawn from where local bad guys declare no-go areas. There's no other country in the world that would put up with that situation. |
| Whoops. My bad. No other functional country. |
Musharraf vowed that Pakistan would not be allowed to become a soft state where foreign terrorists could seek a safe haven.
| Then his lips fell off. Pakistain just happens to be crawling with domestic and foreign terrorist cooties. It's World Terror Central. Each and every major act of international terrorism in the past six years (at the very least) has had a Pakistain connection. |
He said a holistic strategy was pursued to counter extremism and combat terrorism, and there were some misguided elements opposing the government's policy to make Pakistan a secure and prosperous country.
| "Holistic." Is that a synonym for "convoluted, counter-intuitive, and ineffectual"? |
A four-pronged strategy had been adopted in dealing with the malaise. Terrorism was being dealt with a strong military force
while extremism tackled through a prudent approach, Musharraf said,
| That's not even a sentence. I'm not even sure it's a sentence fragment. |
adding that a political strategy was aimed at weaning away the people from extremists and isolating them, coupled with administrative and development steps to overcome the menace of extremism and terrorism.
| Still haven't gotten to the point where you're willing to kill just as many of them as they want to kill of your side, and just as ruthlessly? That tells me you're still trying to work your backroom deals to keep some of them in your pocket as tools to torment your neighbors. |
Musharraf warned that obscurantist views were spilling over into the settled districts which must be stopped.
| He's still using present tense to describe things that should be in past imperfect. |
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