US claims kick up furor in Pakistan

Tue Sep 27, 2011

Pakistani people have staged anti-US rallies across the country to protest at American officials' recent threats and accusations against Islamabad.

Protesters shouted, “We'll sacrifice our lives to save Pakistan" and "Death to America" in a demonstration held outside the US consulate in the southern city of Karachi, AFP reported on Tuesday.

Rallies were also held in the town of Landikotal in the Khyber Agency near the common border with Afghanistan as well as the city of Hyderabad in southern Pakistan.

The already-fragile relations between the two sides were further strained last week, when the US military chief accused Pakistan's intelligence agency of “exporting” violence to Afghanistan.

The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said the Inter-Services Intelligence was supporting the Taliban-allied Haqqani network of militants that is blamed by Washington for recent attacks on the US Embassy and the US-led military alliance of NATO's headquarters in the Afghan capital, Kabul. Islamabad has stiffly rejected the accusations.

On Monday, the US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Washington had to consider military action against Pakistan in the event of, what he called, Islamabad's continued support for militant attacks against the US troops in Afghanistan.

The US says it is considering listing the Haqqani network as a terror group. The potential designation, analysts say, would provide Washington with excuse to go ahead with the attack.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani warned on Tuesday that military course of action by the US inside 'a sovereign country' would not be 'acceptable.'

The premier said the Untied States blames Pakistan for recent attacks in Kabul because “they (the US) have not achieved what they visualized” in Afghanistan, referring to the US-led forces' failure to defuse tension on the Afghan soil, despite their 2001-present presence there.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://www.presstv.com/detail/201541.html.