In The Deal, Seymour Hersh reported that the Bush administration failed to condemn Musharraf’s pardoning of Dr. A. Q. Khan in order to gain Pervez’s support in whatever missions they undertake to capture bin Laden.
Wolfowitz, in this interview, has confirmed that report:
“We feel it gives us more leverage. I think it may give Musharraf a somewhat stronger hand in Pakistan. He’s got an act to clean up.
“The international community is prepared to accept his pardon of A.Q. Khan for all he’s done, but it’s clearly a kind of IOU that, in return for that, there has to be a full accounting of everything that’s happened.”
[Referrer]
According to this report, these sweeps are causing anger and a rise in anti-US sentiment among the Afghan people:
“Contrary to our culture and tradition, the troops search our houses in villages and even occupy them for as long as 15 to 20 days and arrest and terrify the innocent locals on wrong intelligence reports,” Gul Rahman, a member of a tribal delegation,told Xinhua.
The insulting treatment applied by the troops, according to him,prompted the residents of Barmal district in southeast Paktika province to send a delegation of tribal elders to Kabul to take the matter with President Hamid Karzai as well as coalition officials.
“Neither they allow us to go out of our houses nor permit any one to visit us,” another delegate Malik Zari Khan said.
For the last three months, he added, the coalition troops had been combing up villages and taken dozens of innocents into custody.
“We are not Taliban or al-Qaeda rather we are law-obeying citizens and our demand for the Americans as well as for the government is to honor our cultural values and not to harass us arbitrary,” another tribal elder Jahangir Wazir Khan told Xinhua.
In the meantime US military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty downplayed their concerns, saying “spending one night in cold weather is better than living in 23 years of war.” He was referring to over two decades of civil war and Afghan people’s miseries.