Pakistan Criticizes Obama’s Plan for Turning Over Military Command in Afghanistan

By DAVID E. SANGER

Pakistan’s foreign minister on Wednesday issued a biting critique of President Obama’s plan to accelerate the handover of military command in Afghanistan to Afghan forces, declaring that the border with Pakistan has become “less well managed” and that the United States is leaving “without determining whether you have accomplished your objectives.” The minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, who became the country’s first female foreign minister in 2011, said she would not offer her own preferred timetable for an American departure. But in a wide-ranging interview at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, she argued that the United States was being driven more by its determination to leave Afghanistan quickly than by a set of minimal objectives. “ ‘Afghan good enough’ was the right strategy,” she said, referring to the informal name for a White House committee, set up in 2010, that reduced, then reduced again, the American objectives in Afghanistan. But she expressed doubts that the Afghan forces would be able to step up to the job of operating independently across the country, and said that the number of refugees from Afghanistan coming into Pakistan had increased considerably. Ms. Khar also defended Pakistan’s prosecution of Shakil Afridi, the physician who ran a vaccination program in Abbottabad that was started by the Central Intelligence Agency and intended to extract DNA from the occupants of the house where Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding. He was arrested after Bin Laden was killed by an American SEAL team, and the United States government has repeatedly tried, and failed, to get him freed. “To me he is a villain, not a hero,” said Ms. Khar, arguing that he had “contracted himself to terror groups.” He was sentenced to 33 years in prison — ostensibly not for his role in the Bin Laden hunt, but for his ties to an Islamic extremist, Pakistani officials say. She argued that his action, and the C.I.A. program, had now made it all but impossible to conduct vaccination programs. Several Pakistani workers trying to give polio vaccines have been killed by Islamic extremists, who have argued the vaccines are part of an American plot. Ms. Khar also defended the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, at a time American officials are increasingly concerned about new, mobile tactical nuclear weapons — which Pakistan can roll out to the Indian border. The weapons are considered easier to steal than larger weapons kept on Pakistani bases. “We are very confident” that Pakistan can protect its entire arsenal, she said, without referring directly to the new generation of weapons. She repeated her insistence that the United States should end all drone strikes on Pakistani territory, which has been a longtime Pakistani demand. But she argued that for the first time, “I sense that here in America” there is also a sense that “the strikes are counterproductive in the long term.”