Pakistan\u2019s push to curb armed militant groups in the wake of a standoff with India that brought the nuclear-armed neighbours close to war reflected an urgent need for stability to meet growing economic challenges, Prime Minister Imran Khan said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Facing a financial crisis and heavy \npressure to take on militant groups to avoid sanctions from the \nFinancial Action Task Force , a global money laundering and terror \nfinance watchdog, Khan said Pakistan was acting in its own interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEveryone\n now knows that what is happening in Pakistan has never happened \n(before),\u201d Khan told a group of foreign journalists at his office in \nIslamabad on Tuesday, outlining a push to bring the more than 30,000 \nmadrasas across Pakistan under government control and rehabilitate \nthousands of former militants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Islamabad has consistently denied \nthe accusations and said Pakistan has suffered more from militant \nviolence than any other country, with tens of thousands of deaths and \nbillions of dollars in economic damage over recent decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But \nKhan, a former cricket star, implicitly accepted the role played by \nPakistan in fostering and steering militant groups that grew out of the \nUS-backed Mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in neighbouring Afghanistan \nin the 1980s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe have decided, this country has decided, for the\n future of the country forget outside pressure – we will not allow armed\n militias to operate,\u201d he said.The comments underline a push by Pakistan\n to improve its image after years of accusations that its security \nservices have exploited militant groups as proxies against neighbours, \nincluding India and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe should never have allowed \nthem to exist once jihad was over,\u201d he said, rejecting suggestions that \nhe could face opposition from the powerful military and the ISI, \nPakistan\u2019s main intelligence agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cToday, we have the total \nsupport of the Pakistan army and intelligence services in dismantling \nthem,\u201d Khan said. \u201cWhat use has ISI of them any more? These groups were \ncreated for the Afghan jihad.\u201d\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pakistan\u2019s push to curb armed militant groups in the wake of a standoff with India that brought the nuclear-armed neighbours close to war reflected an urgent need for stability to meet growing economic challenges, Prime Minister Imran Khan said. Facing a financial crisis and heavy pressure to take on militant groups to avoid sanctions from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58805,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58806,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58804\/revisions\/58806"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}