Washington, August 05: US President Barack Obama should pressurise Pakistan to stop backing Taliban, said a senior American journalist who was captured by the militant group in 2008.
“President Obama must demand that Pakistan stop backing the Taliban and truly explain our policy toward that country,” journalist and author Jere Van Dyk wrote in an article on the website of the CBS News.
Noting that the US is giving Pakistan over one billion dollars in year, he said, “It is very probable that Pakistan is using some of this US taxpayer money to kill US soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan.”
Dyk, who travelled off and on along both sides of the Afghan – Pakistani border between December 2006 and February 2008, said the WikiLeaks disclosures are further confirmation that what the Taliban told his is true; that Pakistan is working against the US in Afghanistan.
“In February 2008, I was captured by the Taliban in the tribal areas. I was trying to reach Jalaladin Haqqani and Gulbadeen Hekmatyar, two insurgent leaders whom I knew from the 1980s,” he said.
“The Taliban patrol the border for the Pakistani army,” said one of my jailors. When Dyk asked how could they prove this? “We found you, didn’t we,” the jailor responded.
“Musharraf is smart and Bush is stupid. Pakistan defeated the Russians in Afghanistan and now it will defeat the Americans.”
My jailor later told me, just as the WikiLeaks documents state, that former ISI head Ahmed Gul was involved with the Taliban. He mentioned the names of other well-known former Pakistani army officers, Dyk wrote.
“My experiences as a prisoner and knowing some of what my captors had to go through to hide me, their fear of being exposed, and the power of Pakistani political agents, have convinced me that bin Laden is not hiding along the border,” he said.
“The Taliban told me that he was being kept by the ISI. The Taliban were being used regionally, al-Qaeda was international,” Dyk wrote.
—PTI–