Zardari says ‘everybody in ISI completely accountable to him now’

LAHORE - Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari has said that he now has full control over the country’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which has long been suspected of lending secret support to terrorist groups.

“I think that everybody is completely accountable now. The only people who need to have more room for understanding are the international community, who need to support us more,” The Daily Times quoted Zardari, as saying.

“We are in a new era of democracy now. The time that my wife was talking about was the time when nobody was conducting operations in the Swat valley or Waziristan,” he added.

Zardari, whose five-day official visit to the United Kingdom concluded on Sunday, described his meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron as a session of “straight talk”.

He also claimed to have won British backing for his idea of a Marshall Plan to rebuild Afghanistan and Pakistan, ending the poverty that he said left millions of young men in both countries as “jihadist fodder”.

Earlier, last month, whistle-blower organization WikiLeaks had posted over 90000 classified documents about the Afghan war on its website, which suggests that between 2004 and 2009, elements of ISI had armed, trained and financed the Taliban.

The documents allege that former ISI chief Lieutenant General Hamid Gul (ret.), who ran the organization in the late 1980s, frequented Pakistani madrassas where suicide bombers are trained for Afghanistan, and attended planning meetings involving the Afghan Taliban seeking to attack both Afghan officials and foreign troops inside the country. (ANI)