Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, writes what seems to me to be a very important op-ed column in the NYT. He explains why Pakistan may be the biggest victim of all of Islamic terror, and why the West needs to work closely with democratic forces in Pakistan to bring the extremists under control.
The challenge of confronting terrorists who have a vast support network is huge; Pakistan’s fledgling democracy needs help from the rest of the world. We are on the frontlines of the war on terrorism. We have 150,000 soldiers fighting Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their extremist allies along the border with Afghanistan — far more troops than NATO has in Afghanistan.
Nearly 2,000 Pakistanis have lost their lives to terrorism in this year alone, including 1,400 civilians and 600 security personnel ranging in rank from ordinary soldier to three-star general. There have been more than 600 terrorism-related incidents in Pakistan this year. The terrorists have been set back by our aggressive war against them in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Pashtun-majority areas bordering Afghanistan. Six hundred militants have been killed in recent attacks, hundreds by Pakistani F-16 jet strikes in the last two months.
Many of us have thought for a long time that Pakistan, not Iraq or Iran or even Afghanistan, was the most dangerous place in the world when it comes to radical Islam.
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