Pakistan's envoy in Britain Dr Maleeha Lodhi has called for a new and comprehensive strategy to fight terrorism that embraces both short and long term measures. In an interview with private TV channel, Dr Lodhi said that until long-term measures were evolved and implemented that dealt with local and international sources of injustice and alienation, the campaign against terrorism would remain incomplete and inadequate.
Both short steps focussing on law enforcement and long-term winning hearts and minds measures had to move in sync to effectively deal with the challenge at hand.
She stressed that the world needed both a security and political strategy but right now the global community had equipped itself with only the first.
Maleeha said, "so I think a uni-focal preoccupation with madressahs is not going to lead us to the kind of multi-faceted response that we need to evolve to deal with both violent extremism and terrorism."
In response to another question, she said, seminaries were all over the Muslim world but their number soared when there were not enough state schools to impart education to children of the poor as these provided free education.
Pakistan is pursuing a two-pronged policy. First is to modernise and mainstream the madressahs and second is to ensure that education reaches far more people than it does right now so that people do not feel the need to send their children to madressahs in the long run, said the envoy.
Maleeha said President Musharraf had already declared that all the madressahs had to be registered by December this year.
She said, as Pakistan was adjacent to Afghanistan hence wherever there had been bomb blasts, there had been a rush to judgement that it would be involved in one way or the other.
She said there had been an unfair focus on Pakistan by the Western media and referred to bombings in Egypt.
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