Pakistan ‘offered surge in US boots on ground in return for helping oust generals’
February 23, 2012
Source: Telegraph
Pakistan was prepared to allow a surge in US boots on the ground and promised to find Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders in exchange for helping oust two generals amid coup fears.
Mansoor Ijaz, an American businessman, was allowed to give his evidence by videolink from London on Wednesday after he said his safety could not be guaranteed in Pakistan.
He claims he was asked to deliver a memo to American military officers asking for their support in removing the head of the army and the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency in May last year.
Mr Ijaz told a commission investigating the case that he wrote the explosive memo from notes dictated over the telephone by Husain Haqqani, the then Pakistani ambassador to Washington.
He was told that President Asif Ali Zardari himself was behind the plan, he added.
Mr Ijaz said Islamabad was prepared to allow access to Osama bin Laden’s three wives, help in tracking down Mullah Omar and Ayman al-Zawahiri, leaders of the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda respectively, and to disband the ISI’s notorious S Wing – believed to retain links to militant groups.
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