Hillary Clinton on US Engagement in Pak – we are harvesting what we sowed

For last two days, Hillary Clinton has been making statements that I never thought any US administration official could ever make.  But today’s statement below is completely astounding as it comes from the highest foreign policy official from Obama Administration.  It might be music to many in Pakistan and a rather stinging assessment of the previous administrations.  Worth recording.

“We can point fingers at the Pakistanis. I did some yesterday frankly. And its merited because we are wondering why they just don’t go out out there and deal with these people… But the problems we face now to some extent we have to take responsibility for having contributed to it. We also have a history of kind of moving in and out of Pakistan… Let’s remember here…the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago… and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union…they invaded Afghanistan…and we did not want to see them control Central Asia and we went to work…and it was President Reagan in partnership with the Congress led by Democrats who said you know what it sounds like a pretty good idea… let’s deal with the ISI and the Pakistan military and let’s go recruit these mujahideens … and great… let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries… importing their wahaabhi brand of islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union… and guess what.. they (Soviets) retreated… they lost billions of dollars and it led to the collapse of the Soviet Union… So there is a very strong argument which is…it wasn’t a bad investment in terms of Soviet Union but lets be careful with what we sow…because we will harvest… So we then left Pakistan… We said okay fine you deal with the stingers that we left all over your country… you deal with the mines that are along the border and… by the way we don’t want to have anything to do with you… in fact we’re sanctioning you… So we stopped dealing with the Pakistani military and with ISI and we now are making up for a lot of lost time…”