'Marshall Plan' for rebuilding Pakistan and Afghanistan: Zardari says he wins British support

President Asif Ali Zardari said that he has won British backing for his idea of a "Marshall Plan" to rebuild Afghanistan and Pakistan, ending the poverty that left millions of young men in both countries as "jihadist fodder."
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, President Zardari said, the only people who need to have more room for understanding about Pakistan is the international community that need to support his country more.
"I think that everybody is completely accountable now," he said about the institutions in Pakistan during the interview in a London hotel suite. However, while some in international community believe Pakistan could still do more in war on terror, Zardari makes a reasonable assertion to have taken a stronger line than his predecessor, General Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a coup in 1999, the paper said.
Under the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) government, the army has mounted operations to rout militants from many of their key strongholds in the north-west, including the Swat valley and south Waziristan.
He said that as Pakistan was now in civilian hands, such operations had a moral authority that they would have lacked in Musharraf's time, enabling him to be bolder.
"We are in a new era of democracy now," he said. "The time that my wife was talking about was the time when nobody was conducting operations in the Swat Valley or Waziristan," the paper quoted President Zardari as saying.
President Zardari described his meeting on Friday with British Prime Minister David Cameron as a session of "straight talk", which had led to the two becoming "friends" for the future. The President said the issue of terrorism in Britain was a matter for the British authorities to deal with.
By contrast, Musharraf publicly accused Britain of lacking a coherent anti-extremism strategy during a visit to London in early 2008, criticising Downing Street for failing to ban known militant groups, the paper said, adding, asked if he felt the former General Musharraf could be credible rival as a civilian politician, President Zardari was gracious. "It is a free country and he holds a Pakistani passport, so let the people of Pakistan decide," he said.