‘Generals against war with India’

Staff Report

KARACHI: Lt Gen (r) FS Lodi told a South Asian seminar here on Thursday that “no senior army officer in Pakistan wants war with India,” but emphasized the importance of the sharp reduction of tensions in South Asia.

Addressing the seminar organised by the South Asian Editors’ Forum, he said the first step for the removal of the tensions should be troop reduction along the borders.

He told the seminar, “Building Peace in South Asia: Challenges for the Civil Society and the Media,” he said the problem was lack of a balance of balance of power in the Subcontinent.

But he said Kashmir was the core issue between the two countries, and the main reason for Indo-Pakistani confrontation.

Javed Jabbar, a former senator and information minister, there is an asymmetric relationship in South Asia where India was the biggest country. He said useful work had been done at the SAARC level, especially in the domain of heath and containment of drug trafficking. He said as many as 250 million people in India and 400 million people in the whole South Asia live below the poverty line.

The South Asian Editors Forum will hold a South Asian Labour Forum in Karachi in June to identify issues of common concern and to find ways and means to resolve them, Jabbar said.

Pakistan needs to focus its attention on water-management, he emphasized, because it was facing acute shortage of water.

Home | National