Pakistan “epicentre of terrorism” in the world, re-iterates Admiral Mullen [Part-2]
January 13th, 2011 - 5:13 pm ICT by ANI
The top US military official has time and again warned that Pakistan’s tribal region bordering Afghanistan has become the epicentre of terrorism in the world.
“Taliban have a growing influence in most of Afghanistan’s provinces, and the border area between that country and Pakistan remains the epicenter of global terrorism,” Mullen said in his testimonial before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2010.
In October 2010, he again warned that the Afghan-Pak border area remained the ‘epicentre of terrorism,’ and added that many of the militant outfits based in that region were now seeking global reach.
“The reason we’re focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan is that living in that border area are the terrorists from various organisations and it has become the epicentre of terrorism in the world,” Mullen was quoted, as saying in a speech at the Texas A&M University.
“Several of those organisations, in addition to Al-Qaeda, now have global aspirations and are moving to a point of having global operational capacity. And they threaten us very specifically- the United States, Western interests, our European friends,” he added.
In November the same year, in response to a question addressed to him at the John F Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University in Boston, Mullen said: “Resident in that border area, mostly in Pakistan, although not entirely, I call it the epicentre of terrorism in the world.”
“It isn’t just al-Qaeda or the Pakistan Taliban, it’s the Afghan Taliban, it’s LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), which has migrated from an India-focused organisation in the east to the West, and in fact has broader aspirations than that right now. So it has become very synergistic in that part of the world, and that’s why we’re so focused on it,” he added. (ANI)
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