Pakistan's Envoy to UK calls for new global strategy to fight terror
Pakistan Times Foreign Desk

LONDON (UK): Pakistan's envoy in Britain Dr Maleeha Lodhi has called for a new and comprehensive strategy to fight terrorism that embraces both short and long term measures.

In an interview, Dr. Lodhi said that until long term measures were evolved and implemented that dealt with local and international sources of injustice and alienation, the campaign against terrorism would remain incomplete and inadequate.

Both short steps focussing on law enforcement and long term winning hearts and minds measures had to move in sync to effectively deal with the challenge at hand.

Security with Political Strategy

She stressed that the world needed both a security and political strategy but right now the global community had equipped itself with only the first.

Maleeha said "so I think a uni-focal preoccupation with madrassahs is not going to lead us to the kind of multi-faceted response that we need to evolve to deal with both violent extremism and terrorism."

Seminaries

In response to another question , she said, seminaries were all over the Muslim world but their number soared when there were not enough state schools to impart education to children of the poor as these provided free education.

Pakistan is pursuing a two-pronged policy. First is to modernize and mainstream the madrassahs and second is to ensure that education reaches far more people than it does right now so that people do not feel the need to send their children to madrassahs in the long run, said the Envoy.

Maleeha said President Musharraf had already declared all the Madrassahs had to be registered by December this year.

She said as Pakistan was adjacent to Afghanistan hence wherever there had been bomb blasts, there had been a rush to judgment that it would be involved in one way or the other. She said there had been an unfair focus on Pakistan by the Western media and referred to bombings in Egypt.

Baseless News

Explaining she said, despite immediate contradiction by the Egyptian authorities of any Pakistani involvement in the bomb blasts at Sharmel Sheikh tourist resort, the Western media, despite requests for correcting the speculations, carried the baseless news of Pakistani involvement.

"So I think the right balance and perspective is not there in the Western media and that is something that we work hard at trying to ensure," she said.

Maleeha again called for addressing political disputes in the Muslim world as these were causing alienation and a sense of political injustice.

War on Terror

She reiterated the war on terror could not succeed by using military means alone rather it had to be won by winning the hearts and minds of the people.

She said the international community and the Western countries in particular had to make collective efforts in this regard.

Questioned on Pak- Britain cooperation to fight against terrorism she said there was an on-going cooperation in this regard. But this was just one aspect of their broad- based relations which was there even before 7/7 and would remain afterward as well.

It included intelligence sharing but she declined to go into specifics on this count.

Muslims Youth

The envoy said she had always urged British Muslims youth to mainstream themselves in British society to make their voice heard. Isolation is no solution to their problems as it would marginalize them.

On reaction of the British Muslims on 7/7, she said the community's initial response was shock and apprehension of a backlash.

She said Pakistan High Commission had been in constant touch with the community leaders to have their feedback and had advised them to convey their concerns to their elected representatives.●