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WASHINGTON: Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has been warned that without "swift and decisive action", the militant Islamic movement, the Taliban, will soon spread across all of Pakistan, The New York Times reported on Saturday.
The newspaper said the warning came in an interior ministry document made available to it, which said Pakistani security forces in North West Frontier Province were outgunned and outnumbered and had forfeited authority to the Taliban and their allies.
"The ongoing spell of active Taliban resistance has brought about serious repercussions for Pakistan," The Times quotes the 15-page document as saying. "There is a general policy of appeasement towards the Taliban, which has further emboldened them."
The document was discussed by the Pakistani National Security Council in the presence of General Musharraf.
A diplomat, who was not authorised to speak for attribution, called the document "an accurate description of the dagger pointed at the country's heart", the report said.
The United States has poured about one billion dollars a year into Pakistan in the last five years for what are described as reimbursements for Pakistan's counterterrorism efforts along the border with Afghanistan.
The prime purpose of that financial support has been to stop the area from becoming a haven for the Taliban and Al-Qaeda as they wage their insurgency in Afghanistan.
Interior Minister Aftab Khan Sherpao, the prime mover behind the document, narrowly escaped a suicide bomb attack in April by extremists in his home area of Charsadda, northeast of Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, which borders Afghanistan, the paper said.
The attack on Sherpao shook his confidence in General Musharraf's policy toward the militants, which has included a series of peace deals, The Times said.
- AFP/so
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