Former British society girl Jemima Khan and her cricketer-turned-politican husband Imran Khan have both spoken out about the effects of likely American retaliation strikes against terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and his Taliban forces in Afghanistan.
The couple live in the Pakistani capital Islamabad with their two small sons, and are no strangers to terrorism themselves: in 1996 a bomb exploded in the cancer hospital Imran founded in Lahore, killing six people.
In separate articles published Friday in British newspapers, the couple emphasised the need for the US to be 100 per cent sure that bin Laden was the perpetrator of the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington before retaliating. Embarking upon military action without doing so could backfire, they said.
“We must try and get the US to provide evidence of bin Laden’s involvement, otherwise bin Laden will become a martyr and terrorism will only increase,” said Imran in The Times.
Imran also raised the spectre of US strikes possibly creating countless more suicide bombers. “I think the Americans don’t understand that this is a completely new ball game. People everywhere have seen that a few determined people who were not scared to die can create a huge upheaval within a major superpower.”
His wife, writing about her adopted country’s current refugee crises in the Daily Telegraph, echoed her husband’s concerns. “If Osama bin Laden is guilty, then he must be punished, regardless of the consequences. But the evidence against him must be watertight, otherwise the danger is that he may be viewed in Muslim countries simply as a scapegoat for the terrible crimes that have been committed against the American people,” she said.
Jemima said it took her hours to contact her husband in Pakistan after the attacks in the US, and when she finally did so, he expressed his concern that “all Muslims will now be seen as terrorists”.
The daughter of the late billionaire businessman and politician Sir James Goldsmith, Jemima converted to Islam at the time of her 1995 marriage. The following year, her husband founded the Justice Movement Party and ran for prime minister a few months after the bomb explosion at his hospital.
In her article, 27-year-old Jemima, who is currently visiting the UK, expressed her belief that military action will almost certainly “increase terrorism in the long term and destabilize an already volatile region”.
As demonstrators took to the streets of Islamabad to protest their government's agreement to let the US use their airspace and intelligence information, Jemima said that Pakistan’s President Musharraf had been forced to take a decision which either way would propel the country into “financial, economic and social turmoil”.
“Although Musharraf has taken the only decision he could in the circumstances – to condemn terrorism and comply with all of America’s demands – it is still a very high price to pay in order to remain a ‘friend of America’,” she wrote.
“Many Pakistanis feel that America has been a selective friend and that the Afghans are their more natural allies. There may well be a huge backlash in the event of military strikes and I worry that Musharraf or the army will be unable to contain it.”
Photo: © Alphapress.com
Photo: © Alphapress.com
