Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) on Saturday strongly reacted to the allegations levelled against its leadership by MQM chief Altaf Hussain and expressed deep anguish over deliberate distortion of the Kargil episode.
"Altaf Hussain by distorting facts tried to bail out his benefactor General Musharraf from the responsibility of Kargil fiasco", said PML-N's deputy secretary-general Ahsan Iqbal, adding that the reality has already come out from the horse's mouth as General Anthony Zinni, who headed the US Central Command from 1997 to 2000 and was sent to Pakistan as a special presidential envoy during the Kargil crisis, has given first-hand account of the events in his book.
Referring to the book 'Battle Ready', authored by General Anthony Zinni, he said: "It was President Pervez Musharraf who advised and persuaded former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to listen to the US proposal for withdrawing troops from Kargil". Ahsan said that General Zinni dispels the general impression that it was the civilian leadership in Pakistan that sought Washington`s help for arranging a respectable withdrawal from Kargil.
Instead, the former general says, Pakistan's civilian leadership was worried about a loss of face that the withdrawal could have caused and to allay their fears President Bill Clinton offered a plan that could have arranged a respectable withdrawal", he clarified.
But even at this stage, according to General Zinni, the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his civilian colleagues appeared reluctant to endorse a withdrawal. That got Musharraf`s attention, and he encouraged Prime Minister Sharif to "hear me out and go to Washington D.C.", Ahsan quotes General Zinni from his book, which was published in the United States.
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