Talk to not at Pakistan Zardari tells US

Talk to, not at, Pakistan, Zardari tells US
Terrorists have gained the most from the recent American verbal assaults against Pakistan, and the strategy is damaging bilateral relations and

compromising common goals in defeating terrorism, extremism and fanaticism, President Asif Ali Zardari wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington

Post on Saturday.
“Democracy always favours dialogue over confrontation. So, too, in Pakistan, where the terrorists who threaten both our country and the United States

have gained the most from the recent verbal assaults some in America have made against Pakistan,” Zardari said. “It is time for the rhetoric to cool and

for serious dialogue between allies to resume,” the president said in the WP. He said the country’s motives were simple. “We have a huge population of

young people who have few choices in life. Our task is to turn this demographic challenge into a dividend for democracy and pluralism, where the

embrace of tolerance elbows out the lure of extremism, where jobs turn desolation into opportunity and empowerment, where ploughshares take the

place of guns, where women and minorities have a meaningful place in society,” he said.
“None of this vision for a new Pakistan is premised on the politics of victim hood. It pivots on a worldview where we fight the war against extremism

and terrorism as our battle, at every precinct and until the last person, even though we lack the resources to match our commitment. When Pakistan

seeks support, we look for trade that will make us sustainable, not aid that will bind us in transactional ties.”
He said with Pakistan pounded “by the ravages of globally driven climate change, with floods once again making millions of our citizens homeless”, the

country’s closest ally was talking instead of hearing. “We are being battered by nature and by our friends. This has shocked a nation that is bearing the

brunt of the terrorist whirlwind in the region.”
Zardari added that Pakistan was fighting an ideology that “feeds on brutality and coercion that has taken the lives of our minister for minorities, Shahbaz

Bhatti and former governor Salman Taseer, among thousands of others. And we have seen our greatest leader, the mother of my children,

assassinated by a conspiracy that was powered by the same mindset we are now accused of tolerating”.