Pakistan wants 'real dialogue' with conditions, national security advisor tells India

This file photo shows Dr. Moeed Yusuf at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Capitol Hill, Washington DC, on May 5, 2011. (Getty Images via AFP)

• Dr Moeed Yusuf alleges India used one million dollars to help Pakistani Taliban reunite with splinter groups
• Calls reports about millions of Muslim Uighurs being kept in internment camps in China a 'non-issue'

ISLAMABAD: Dr. Moeed Yusuf, special assistant to the Pakistani prime minister on national security and strategic policy planning, has said his government had received messages from the administration in New Delhi to open talks between the two states.
Ties between arch-rivals Pakistan and India have been particularly tense since August last year when India revoked the special autonomy of the disputed Kashmir region it governs. 
Muslim-majority Kashmir has been the site of decades of hostility between nuclear arch-rivals India and Pakistan. Both countries claim it in full but rule it in part.
“In the past year, we have got the messages about a desire for conversation,” Yusuf said in an interview to Indian journalist, Karan Thapar, which was aired on Tuesday. “But you know why there is desire for conversation in my reading? So that there is a dialogue which India can take to the world and say, ‘Oh, everything is settled. Pakistan and India have agreed’ … We want real dialogue and have laid down certain conditions.”
Yusuf outlined pre-conditions necessary for any dialogue with India, including that New Delhi release all political prisoners in Kashmir, lift “military siege” in the area, reverse a contentious domicile bill and stop all human rights violations against Kashmiris.
He also insisted that the people of Kashmir must be a third party in any negotiations between the two South Asian nuclear-armed countries, a condition that is unacceptable to India. 
Yusuf said even pro-India Kashmiri politicians had now publicly admitted that no one in Indian-controlled Kashmir was willing to live under Indian rule any longer.
In what is the first interview to the Indian media by any Pakistani official since August 2019, Yusuf also alleged that New Delhi had used one million dollars from funds at its high commission in Islamabad to help the Pakistani Taliban merge with splinter groups in 2019.
In August this year, the Pakistani Taliban announced they had brought a number of splinter groups back into their fold. The group, fighting to overthrow the government and install its own brand of Shariah, is an umbrella of militant groups called Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has broken into many divisions.
The TTP, designated a terrorist group by the United States, remained in disarray in recent years, especially after several of its top leaders were killed by US drone strikes on both sides of the border, forcing its members into shelter in Afghanistan, or fleeing to urban Pakistan.
“In 2019, the Indian embassy’s funds were used, amounting to USD one million, to effect the merger of the TTP,” said Pakistan’s de facto national security chief. “The Pakistani Taliban, the TTP, have just merged with four other organizations. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, Harkat-ul-Ansar and a couple of others,” he said, naming a few of the splinter groups.
“Congratulations to the R&AW [Indian intelligence agency]; they have succeeded in creating an organization to kill Pakistanis,” Yusuf added.
India has long denied it backs militants who attack Pakistan, and accuses Pakistan of backing militants that infiltrate and foment violence in the part of the disputed Kashmir valley India controls. Pakistan denies the charge.
“Please stop perpetrating terror against Pakistan,” he said during the interview. “It doesn't help anybody. My message is peace.”
Speaking about reports that 1.5 million Muslim Uighurs were being kept in reeducation camps in China, a longtime Pakistan ally, Yusuf said: “We are 100 percent satisfied it is a non-issue. The West can say what it wants; I can say to you as a responsible official that we know everything about Uighurs and it is a non-issue.”
China has faced growing international opprobrium for what it says are vocational training centers in Xinjiang, a vast region bordering central Asia that is home to millions of ethnic minority Muslims. Beijing has said the measures are needed to stem the threat of terrorism.
Pakistan has come under fire in recent years for accusing India of human rights abuses in Kashmir but not speaking up for the rights of Muslims in China.
Yusuf also maintained that Pakistan wanted to pursue economic security and connectivity for the prosperity of Pakistan and the region, but policy makers in New Delhi were moving in the 'opposite direction.'