WASHINGTON: Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Chief Imran Khan on Friday rebutted charges he is anti-West and said his vision for an Islamic society looked like Scandinavia.
Khan, who has drawn hundreds of thousands of followers in recent months after years in the political wilderness, reiterated his staunch criticism of the US campaign against Islamic extremists as he addressed a forum in Washington.
But he rejected perceptions that his views are anti-Western. Khan said he was one of the few Pakistani politicians to have spent substantial time in the West.
"To be anti-Western makes absolutely no sense at all. The West is geography. How can you be anti-geography?" Khan told the Atlantic Council, a think-tank, via Internet video provider Skype.
"And to be anti-American... how can you be anti-a whole country, where there are so many different views?" he said.
"I have always been anti-the American war on terror. I have always thought that this was an insane war," Khan said.
"I have never understood what they were trying to achieve. I still don't know what victory is in the war on terror," Khan said.
"In my opinion, the only solution is to have dialogue, a political solution, the same as is the case across the border" in Afghanistan, Khan said.
But Khan -- whom former military ruler Pervez Musharraf once called a "Taliban without the beard" -- said that he had to "demystify" to Western audiences his idea of an Islamic society.
"If you ask me today what is closest to that ideal, I would say the Scandinavian countries," Khan said, praising them for their "humane society, where there is rule of law, a society that looks after its weak, its handicapped."
Such a society is the opposite of Pakistan "where literally the poor people are subsidizing the rich, while all the jails are full of poor people."
"No longer being the president and having the protection which he has, I would not be the insurance company to give him life insurance," Khan said.
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