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Pakistanis feel screwed on Kashmir: Bill Clinton
?Pakistanis felt screwed on Kashmir?
Updated on Monday, October 05, 2009, 23:48 IST Tags:Bill Clinton, Kashmir, Pakistan
Washington: With the US not supporting their cause in Kashmir and sanctions imposed on them through the Pressler Amendment that had banned assistance to Pakistan, Islamabad felt "screwed on Kashmir," the then US President Bill Clinton is reported to have said.
Clinton said this to Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer prize winner author, who recently published the book 'The Clinton Tapes'. The book is based on the secret conversation Branch had with Clinton during his presidential years inside the White House. The book reflects Clinton being sympathetic to Pakistan and wanting to help it.
"Separately, he said they feel screwed on Kashmir, because the United States has long deferred to annexation by India against the majority wish of the Kashmiris," Branch writes in his latest book that hit the stores last week.
"Also, it was fundamentally unfair that the US Pressler Amendment punished Pakistan and not India for the development of nuclear weapons," Clinton said. The amendment banned military and economic assistance to Pakistan.
Pakistan still offered a nuclear-free South Asia, complete with international inspections, but India insisted that she needed nuclear weapons to deter China, the book says.
Branch said: "Benazir Bhutto's main purpose in Washington was to seek relief for Pakistan's F-16 aircraft confiscated under the Pressler Amendment after the full USD 1 billion purchase price had been paid to Lockheed Martin."
Bhutto, desperate for foreign exchange, secretly preferred a refund to possession of the planes, but current US law blocked either course. "If I couldn’t get an exception to the Pressler Amendment through a Democratic Congress," lamented the president, "I sure can't get one through now."
Legislators loved to boast about striking a blow against nuclear proliferation, he said, to the point of outright thievery. All he could do for Bhutto was scrap her rusting planes and seek to return a pittance from their value in salvage." Branch wrote.
Clinton during these secret conversations also praised Pakistan in providing full cooperation to it in terrorist attacks investigations. "Clinton reeled off details of significant cooperation for which the Pakistanis deserved credit," it said.
"Pakistan was still paying a heavy price, said the president, for its steadfast support of our surrogate war in the 1980s against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. First it was overrun by refugees, then by drug dealers, until a diverted poppy trade created some three million heroin addicts in Pakistan.
Bhutto’s government had just extradited to the United States the captured fugitive Ramzi Yousef, an alleged "mastermind of the 1993 truck bomb that killed six people and injured a thousand in New York’s World Trade Center," the book said.
?Pakistanis felt screwed on Kashmir?
Updated on Monday, October 05, 2009, 23:48 IST Tags:Bill Clinton, Kashmir, Pakistan
Washington: With the US not supporting their cause in Kashmir and sanctions imposed on them through the Pressler Amendment that had banned assistance to Pakistan, Islamabad felt "screwed on Kashmir," the then US President Bill Clinton is reported to have said.
Clinton said this to Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer prize winner author, who recently published the book 'The Clinton Tapes'. The book is based on the secret conversation Branch had with Clinton during his presidential years inside the White House. The book reflects Clinton being sympathetic to Pakistan and wanting to help it.
"Separately, he said they feel screwed on Kashmir, because the United States has long deferred to annexation by India against the majority wish of the Kashmiris," Branch writes in his latest book that hit the stores last week.
"Also, it was fundamentally unfair that the US Pressler Amendment punished Pakistan and not India for the development of nuclear weapons," Clinton said. The amendment banned military and economic assistance to Pakistan.
Pakistan still offered a nuclear-free South Asia, complete with international inspections, but India insisted that she needed nuclear weapons to deter China, the book says.
Branch said: "Benazir Bhutto's main purpose in Washington was to seek relief for Pakistan's F-16 aircraft confiscated under the Pressler Amendment after the full USD 1 billion purchase price had been paid to Lockheed Martin."
Bhutto, desperate for foreign exchange, secretly preferred a refund to possession of the planes, but current US law blocked either course. "If I couldn’t get an exception to the Pressler Amendment through a Democratic Congress," lamented the president, "I sure can't get one through now."
Legislators loved to boast about striking a blow against nuclear proliferation, he said, to the point of outright thievery. All he could do for Bhutto was scrap her rusting planes and seek to return a pittance from their value in salvage." Branch wrote.
Clinton during these secret conversations also praised Pakistan in providing full cooperation to it in terrorist attacks investigations. "Clinton reeled off details of significant cooperation for which the Pakistanis deserved credit," it said.
"Pakistan was still paying a heavy price, said the president, for its steadfast support of our surrogate war in the 1980s against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. First it was overrun by refugees, then by drug dealers, until a diverted poppy trade created some three million heroin addicts in Pakistan.
Bhutto’s government had just extradited to the United States the captured fugitive Ramzi Yousef, an alleged "mastermind of the 1993 truck bomb that killed six people and injured a thousand in New York’s World Trade Center," the book said.