Defense Writers Group

TRANSCRIPT Defense Writers Group A Project of the Center for Media & Security New York and Washington, D.C. Sartaj Aziz Advisor to the Prime Minister of Pakistan on Foreign Affairs March 1, 2016 THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT AND MAY CONTAIN ERRORS. USERS ARE ADVISED TO CONSULT THEIR OWN TAPES OR NOTES OF THE SESSION IF ABSOLUTE VERIFICATION OF WORDING IS NEEDED. DWG: Thank you to our guest this morning who is Sartaj Aziz, the Advisor to the Prime Minister of Pakistan on Foreign Affairs. Sir, thank you for coming in today. We do appreciate you making the time for us. As the moderator I will actually turn things over to Mr. Aziz for his opening thoughts before asking the first question. Sir, you’re in town for some meetings with the U.S. government. Give us your thoughts on where things stand right now. Mr. Aziz: Thank you very much. As most of you may be aware I was here for what’s called the annual Strategic Dialogue with the U.S. government at the foreign secretary level, foreign minister level. This is our sixth. We had started this process in 2010 when we had three meetings in the same year. March, July and October. Then the dialogue was interrupted for three years, when our government came in June 2013 and Secretary Kerry visited Pakistan in August we revived the Strategic Dialogue. So it is six working groups under this dialogue process. One on energy, one on economy and finance, one on counterterrorism and related subjects, one on the overall non-proliferation regime, and the related subjects, and finally there is one new one on education, science and technology. So these groups meet in the middle of the year to explore the possibilities of cooperation and [inaudible], and then once a year they present their report, both sides, the co-chair from U.S. and us, and to identify what progress has been made and what new ideas would come. So if you want I can give you, if some of you are interested. In the energy sector we are focusing on more renewable energy. Education is the new group which has been set up and it’s exploring various options of inter- university cooperation and more students coming in and so on. Similarly, on counterterrorism we have a lot of cooperation on training, capacity building and intelligence sharing. And similarly on the nuclear and other related issues. Also there is very good interaction. So this is a very useful forum and it gives us a chance to, and then of course we also have discussed regional issues like Afghanistan and other regional and global issues. So discussions went quite well yesterday. Basically, my view, the situation as it is evolving, and maybe I should do that in any case, update you on the situation in Pakistan because that is the background of it, the discussions take place. In the last two years and eight months since our government has come there are some significant developments which have improved the current situation. And the most important, of course, is our determined campaign against terrorism. Because we inherited this problem from 9/11 onwards when people were pushed into our side of the border and they became a threat to us because they lost their hold in that part of the world so they were trying to find a foothold. Our tribal belt between Pakistan and Afghanistan is a very long belt and a very open territory, so they came and established themselves in different parts. Initially they came to seek refuge but they soon realized that unless the controlled territory and [the forces] they can’t survive there, so they started expanding their activities, and by 2007, ’08, they had covered most of the tribal area. And it was, they killed the tribal leaders and they started establishing their communication networks, IED factories, suicide training centers. It was unbelievable how quickly, and they trained themselves in the tribal belt. And so we started getting very large-scale attacks in our cities, suicide attacks, bomb blasts, and I think in these 14 years we have lost about 60,000 people including 10,000 civilians and the economic losses will go beyond 100 billion. So this became a very big threat. The process actually did start in 2009 before our government came in in SWAT, and some other agencies in [South Waziristan]. But one agency was left and that was North Waziristan, because it was very difficult terrain to reach. The largest agency. And many of these, out of seven agencies that we have cleared, those groups which could not survive there, they all migrated and centered activities to North Waziristan. So North Waziristan by now, by 2013, had become the hub of many foreign and local terrorist groups. 2 Our own Pakistani Taliban as we call them, TTP, Chechnyans, Uzbeks, Chinese, it was, it has become a hotbed of myriad things. And our own [rate] was very limited at that time, apart from military camps. So in 2014, June, the operations out of the [inaudible], military operation was started, and it was a very difficult operation. Now it has lasted 15 months and by now we have achieved the results that we needed because the entire infrastructure has been destroyed. And according to our estimation, the IED factories in this particular agency, if they had gone on the way, without disruption they identified at least for the next 20 years at the scale of attacks that they were doing, so they are [evolving] now. Communication infrastructure is also disrupted. IED factories. In one mosque that I visited I remember in Miranshah, from the outside I didn’t see anything. But under the mosque there was a 70 room basement, three stories in which there were four or five IED factories, four or five suicide training centers, communication networks, [inaudible] room, conference rooms, amazing infrastructure. And similarly there must be 30, 40 in other parts of the agency. So this has been a very successful operation. From there on, what the next stage was, what you call the next [inaudible] [plans]. This was not in 2014, but in December 2014 we had the school attack in Peshawar. 140 children were killed. And that created a tremendous reaction in the population. And in a way it led to a very strong national consensus. Before that there were pockets of support for these groups, [vis-à-vis] Afghanistan, [inaudible], others. But when this thing happened in December 2014, the national, all the political parties, the [police] and others, including the religious parties. They met for the week and agreed on a war within two weeks, a national election plan. Twenty-point national election plan to take on anti, counterterrorism on a very systematic basis. Following the operations [inaudible], the next stage was the flushing out of intelligence-based operations. And this is maybe half, maybe 40 percent of these were in this tribal belt. Once the operation started, they all migrated to cities. In cities they would take houses. And they didn’t have a big infrastructure of FATA tribal area, but around cities they could rent one or two houses and make small IED factories, suicide attacks or something, something. So their capacity to cause damage remained and they did line some attacks. So the [inaudible] operation means police unit in every knows who’s rented which house and who’s living where, but it doesn’t have the capacity to take action. When the police intelligence is combined with the [inaudible] military intelligence which is our Rangers, the military force, then it works. So this operation has now been going on for the last 13 months and they have apprehended or eliminated about 25,000 terrorists based on this operation. And so last year, therefore, as a result the total amount of attacks have gone down by more than 50 percent compared to 2014 and it’s gradually going down because of their capacity to operate. 3 So this is the immediate damage. The second part is now starting. The important part is the Madrasa reform, because we have a large number of Madrasas which are set up during the [inaudible] war when they were training people to fight the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Pakistan jointly funded, armed and created. Those Madrasas had [exploded] and there were a large number, about 7,500 unregistered Madrasas. So they have now been closed down. Either they [inaudible] under the rules or they can’t operate. And their funding is checked and they can’t train foreigners. And now we are going to the next stage along with Madrasa reforms, the total control of their activities and funding and curriculum. And that is going on. Now the next stage would be what you call deradicalization in which you de-recount the narrative of how young people are attracted and use of social media. So it’s a very long term program, but I think Pakistan is, because of the commitment to act against terrorism without discrimination, it is moving in the right direction. There are still, the job is of course not finished because there are [inaudible], the terrorists are a different kind of organization. Some have attacking our system openly, open warfare and those have required military action. Those who are not doing it so blatantly, they require a different action. Both administrative sanctions, control of funding, control of publicity, and [inaudible]. A lot of things we have taken action against those people who spread hate speech, literature, the control of their media projection, and so on and so forth.

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