Islamabad: Pakistan’s Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan responding strongly to GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s remarks on Islamabad said that it was not a colony of the United States.
Trump in an interview to Fox News interview said that if elected, he would free Dr Shakeel Afridi, revered as a hero in the US and is serving a 33-year-long punishment in jail for treason in ‘two minutes’.
Asked how would he do that? Trump said: “I would tell them [Pakistanis] let him out and I’m sure they would let him out.”
Acknowledging that Nisar said that Pakistan’s courts will decide the fate of a tribal areas doctor who had helped the American CIA track and kill al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad compound in 2011, reports the Express Tribune.
“Shakeel Afridi is a Pakistani citizen, and nobody else has the right to dictate us his future,” he said. “Trump’s perception and his comments about Pakistan [in the interview] are highly misplaced and unwarranted,” Nisar said.
He also said that Islamabad was not a colony of the United States. “He [Trump] should learn to treat sovereign states with respect,” he added.
Nisar pressed that Trump seemed to be ignorant of the huge sacrifices Pakistan and its people have rendered while supporting US policies over the years.
“The peanuts the US has given us in return should not be used to threaten or browbeat us into following Trump’s misguided vision of foreign policy,” he said. “Trump’s statement shows not only his insensitivity but also his ignorance about Pakistan,” he said.
Trump in the interview also said he would keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan so they could keep close watch on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
The New York billionaire’s remarks have severely angered Islamabad forcing Nisar to respond aggressively.(ANI)