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India links ISI to Mumbai, Pakistan calls for patience

NEW DELHI: India has described the ‘organisers’ of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai and the Indian embassy in Kabul as “clients and creations of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)”, but said its goal was to find a stable Pakistan at peace with itself.

Addressing a foreign affairs conference in Paris, Indian Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon warned the world against any ‘compromise’ with ‘such forces’. The speech was given on Wednesday, but its text was released in India on Thursday. Responding to the allegation, Pakistan said Indian officials should avoid making such statements at a time when Islamabad was in the process of investigating the attacks.

“One should not jump the gun. Some patience should be shown,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit told Reuters. Menon said at the conference at the Institute Francais des Relations Internationales that the effects of the “terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan have been felt in Afghanistan for a long time”. “For Afghanistan to regain peace, the roots of international terrorism in parts of Pakistan and its local sponsors will have to be eliminated,” he said.

Menon also expressed Indian opposition to the US sale of arms to Pakistan for the war on terror, saying such supplies were “totally unrelated” to the objective and rather acted as “whisky to an alcoholic, a drug reinforcing an addiction”. India has “directly suffered the consequences of linkages and relationships among terrorist organisations, their support structures, official sponsors and funding mechanisms, which transcend national borders but operate within them”, he said.

“Any compromise with such forces, howsoever pragmatic or opportune it might appear momentarily, only encourages them,” Menon said. iftikhar gilani/reuters

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