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Pakistan dismissed as “absurd” US claims that Al-Qaeda has set up new training camps in a remote tribal area, saying that if Washington has any evidence it should share it with Islamabad.
A US official said Monday that compounds training 10 or 20 people at a time for possible attacks on the West had been detected over the past year in a semi-autonomous tribal area along the mountainous border with Afghanistan.
The compounds are “small,” the US official told AFP on condition of anonymity. “They are not like the big camps that they had seen in Afghanistan previously.”
But Pakistan foreign ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam angrily rejected the allegations, the latest in a series to trouble Washington's relations with its key ally in the “war on terror.”
“This is an absurd report and we dismiss it,” Aslam told AFP.
Pakistan was committed to fighting terrorism and more than 700 of its troops had been killed fighting Al-Qaeda-linked militants who fled the demise of Afghanistan's Taliban regime in 2001, Aslam said.
Pakistan had 80,000 troops and 1,000 military posts on the border and was “taking further steps to control the border starting with selective fencing” of around 35 kilometres (20 miles) of the frontier.
The US official's comments came in the wake of a New York Times report which said that the compounds were under the loose command of groups of Arab, Pakistani and Afghan militants allied with Al-Qaeda.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri on arrival in India Tuesday also rejected the allegation.
Kasuri said Pakistan was not solely responsible for the fall-out from the Soviet invasion and the subsequent war of liberation in Afghanistan which was supported by US and Western allies.
He said Western pressure to evict the former Soviet Union from Afghanistan after a 1979 invasion led directly to the recruitment of Muslim fighters from around the world to move to its lawless tribal belt on the border.
“Pakistan alone was not responsible for this entire action. It's very easy to find convenient scapegoats. It's an international responsibility.”
Pakistan military spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said the United States should hand over specific evidence about the location and set-up of the camps to back up its claims.
“Show us the intelligence. Share it with us, what is the problem. Why don't you give us real time intelligence?” Sultan told AFP.
The Pakistani ambassador to the United States, Mahmud Ali Durrani, had earlier played down the US claims.
“There may be an odd place. And when we find out we take it out. We have done that recently,” he said in an interview with CNN. “But saying they have re-established themselves and there are a lot of compounds and they have rejuvenated — that is incorrect.”
In September Pakistan signed a peace deal with militants in North Waziristan, prompting suspicions from Kabul and the commanders of international forces battling the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Pakistan insists the agreement has helped curtail infiltration across the porous frontier into Afghanistan. The insurgency in Afghanistan killed 4,000 people last year.
