‘Zardari greatest obstacle to Pakistan’s progress’ پاکستان کی ترقی میں زارداری سب بڑی رکاوٹ ہیں۔ شاہ عبداللہ

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WikiLeaks unleashes flood of US cables

‘Zardari greatest obstacle to Pakistan’s progress’

* Saudi King told Iraqi official ‘when the head is rotten, it affects whole body’ 

* Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against al Qaeda 

* Mossad wanted to keep Gen Musharraf in power

Daily Times Monitor

LAHORE: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called President Asif Ali Zardari the greatest obstacle to Pakistan’s progress, according to a cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables released to The New York Times and other organisations on Sunday.

The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, which intends to make the archive public on its website in batches. 

The cables disclosed frank comments behind closed doors. Dispatches from early this year, for instance, quote the aging monarch of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, as speaking scathingly about the leaders of Iraq and Pakistan. 

Speaking to an Iraqi official about Nouri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, King Abdullah said, “You and Iraq are in my heart, but that man is not.” The king called Zardari the greatest obstacle to that country’s progress. “When the head is rotten,” he said, “it affects the whole body.” 

Also, it said that since 2007, the US has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the US taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons’,” he argued.

The leaks depict the Obama administration struggling to sort out which Pakistanis are trustworthy partners against al Qaeda, and assessing whether a lurking rickshaw driver in Lahore, was awaiting fares or conducting surveillance of the road to the American Consulate. 

Also, the cables reveal that Frances Fragos Townsend, the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism (AFHSC), met Mossad Director Meir Dagan on July 12 for a general discussion on regional security threats. Dagan and Townsend surveyed political developments in North Africa, Turkey and the Gulf, and shared concerns about ‘s ability to withstand the challenge of extremist radicals.

Townsend and Dagan then embarked on an informal tour of the region, comparing notes on countries critical to combatting terrorism. Dagan characterised a Pakistan ruled by radical extremists with a nuclear arsenal at their disposal as his biggest nightmare. Al Qaeda and other “Global Jihad” groups could not be relied upon to behave rationally once in possession of nuclear weapons, said Dagan, as they do not care about the well being of states or their image in the media. “We have to keep (President Pervez) Musharraf in power,” said Dagan.