‘Let us be truthful to ourselves and make a candid admission of the realities’, Zardari said. ‘The terrorists of today were the heroes of yesteryears until 9/11 occurred and they began to haunt us as well. These groups were not thrown up because of government weakness, but as a matter of policy’.

Pakistan President said these groups were not thrown up because of government weakness, but they were deliberately "created and nurtured" as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives.

His comments amount to an admission that Pakistan trained Islamic terrorists to launch attacks on India as part of its long war over its claim on Kashmir.

It came as at least 40 people were killed in a suspected US missile strike in north-west Pakistan.

Zardari first confirmed that many of the Islamic militants now waging war against his government were once "strategic assets" in an interview with the Daily Telegraph earlier this week.
 
"I don’t think anybody in the establishment supports them any more. I think everybody has become more wise than this," he said and confirmed the military was now targeting those it had previously used as proxies in attacks on India.

Islamic militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed have long been regarded as Pakistan proxy forces by diplomats and intelligence services but Islamabad has, until now, always denied any links.

The LeT was created to fight with the Afghan Mujahideen against the former Soviet-backed Najibullah regime in Kabul and to attack Indian forces in Jammu and Kashmir.

LeT was responsible for the attack on Delhi’s Red Fort. It was involved with another Pakistan-backed terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed in the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.

Pakistan terrorists were also behind the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines jet which forced the Indian government to release three jailed militants, including Masood Azhar, the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was later arrested for the murder of Daniel Pearl.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has accused elements within Pakistan’s security apparatus of aiding the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s attack on Mumbai last November.

TWICE this week President Zardari has spoken about the root of Pakistan’s problems with religious extremism and militancy. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, the president said that the military’s erstwhile “strategic assets” were the ones against whom military operations were now required. And in a meeting with retired senior bureaucrats in Islamabad on Tuesday, Mr Zardari was reported in this paper to have said that “militants and extremists had been deliberately created and nurtured as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives”. The president is right, and we would add the policy was wrong then and it is wrong now. It cannot be any other way. How is it possible to rationally explain to the people of Pakistan that the heroes of yesteryear are the arch-enemies of today? The militants’ religious justifications remain the same; what’s changed is that the militants were fighting the state’s ‘enemies’ yesterday but have turned their guns on the state and its allies today.

Perhaps more than anything else impeding the defeat of the militants today is the inability of the security establishment to revisit the strategic choices it made in the past and hold up its hand and admit candidly that grave mistakes were made. Should we have ever used jihadi proxies to fight the Russians in Afghanistan? Should we have ever supported the idea of armed jihad in Kashmir? Should we have ever sought to retain our influence in Afghanistan through the Taliban? If any of those choices ever made sense, then we should have no complaints about the rise of Talibanisation in Pakistan because we created the climate and opportunity for them to run amok. Blaming the US’s invasion of Afghanistan is no good — the first and foremost responsibility of the state is to ensure the security of Pakistan, and allowing an internal threat to create a space for itself is anathema to that idea. Whatever the catalyst, the fact remains that it was because a jihadi network was allowed to flourish inside the country that we were left exposed to its eventual wrath against us.

The fault is of course not ours alone. The US, obsessed with the Soviet enemy, happily colluded in the creation of Muslim warriors. Our Middle Eastern and Gulf allies were happy to create a Sunni army to counter the ‘threat’ from post-revolution Shia Iran. But, at the end of the day, it was Pakistani soil on which they were primarily nurtured. Because they were raised in our midst we should have always been wary of the extreme blowback we are now confronted with. http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/editorial/jihad-and-the-state-979