About Suicide attacks; because the 9/11 bombers did suicide attacks, all sorts of theories came out like those about virgins in heaven. This bizarre … - Imran Khan

Now I want to move on to talk about Kashmir. When we came into power; my first priority was that Pakistan would be that country that would try its best to bring peace. Joining the war on terror, Pakistan went through one of its worst periods. We lost 70,000 people to the war, 150 billion dollar to our economy. We joined the war against the Soviets in the 1980’s. Pakistan trained the then “Mujahedeen” at the behest of the Americans. The Soviets called them terrorists, the Americans called them freedom fighters, then. Soviets left, US packed up. Come 9/11, now that we had to join the US and tell the same indoctrinated people this is now not a “freedom struggle” but “terrorism”. They suddenly saw us as collaborators; it became a nightmare and they turned against us. 70,000 Pakistanis lost their lives, due to a war Pakistan had nothing to do with. No Pakistani was involved in 9/11. So when we came into power; we decided to disband all militant groups. And this was a decision taken by all political parties. I know that India keeps saying we have militant organisations but I invite UN observers to come and see for themselves. Secondly we started mending fences. We engaged with Afghanistan, Iran.

In my country, when I took charge of our government a year back, in the 10 years preceding that our total debt went up 4 times. As a result; the total revenue we collect in one year, half of it went into debt servicing. How will we spend on our 220 million population when our money was plundered by the ruling elite? And when we located properties of these corrupt leaders in western capitals, we find it so difficult to retrieve it. If we retrieve the plundered money, we could spend it on human development. But there are laws protecting these criminals. We don’t have the money to hire lawyers worth millions of dollars. The rich countries must show political will; they can not allow this flight of capital from poor countries through corruption. How can poor countries meet the United Nations SDG’s when money for human development can easily leave our countries? There must be a deterrent; the corrupt ruling elite must not be allowed to take money out and park it in tax havens. Why is it legal to have tax havens where you have these secret accounts? The world is changing; if the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, there will be a crisis soon. It will lead to a major crisis. The world bank, the IMF, the Asian developing bank must find a way to stop this plunder.

And then India; let me tell you my relationship with India. Because of cricket, which is followed with great passion in the subcontinent, I have great friends in India. I’ve always loved going to India. So my first move was to reach out to Modi and I said let’s work our differences, leave our past behind and our main priority should be our people as we have similar problems; poverty and climate change. Highest number of people reside in subcontinent. On zero response from India; we thought we should wait till the Indian elections since BJP is a nationalist party. Meanwhile, a Kashmiri boy radicalized by Indian forces blew himself up on an Indian convoy. Immediately India blamed Pakistan. I told India to give us any proof and we’d act. We had actual proofs of Indian intervention in some terrorist attacks in our Balochistan province. We even caught their spy Kulbhushan Yadav who admitted to crimes. Instead of sharing proofs of any Pakistani’s alleged involvement in Pulwama attack, they tried to bomb us. We retaliated. We captured their pilot; but returned him the next day because we did not want the situation to escalate.