Pak troops not hunting for Osama: Musharraf

LONDON: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has said his troops were really not hunting for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden but more focussed on battling the Taliban and dimissed as 'pinpricks' the rising militant attacks in his country.
    
"The 100,000 troops that we are using to fight terrorists... are not going around trying to locate Osama bin Laden and Zawahri, frankly," Musharraf told a conference at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris on Tuesday.
     
That Osama bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are still at large "doesn't mean much," said Musharraf, who is in France on the second leg of his four-nation European tour. The two most wanted men are believed to be hiding somewhere in the Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
    
"They (the troops) are operating against terrorists, and in the process, if we get them, we will deal with them, certainly," Musharraf said in remarks suggesting it was more important to battle the Taliban and that the al-Qaida was less of a threat to his country.
     
Musharraf stressed that the remnants of the former Taliban regime of neighbouring Afghanistan are the 'more serious issue', for the US and Pakistan.
      
Rejecting suggestions that the violence in the border areas was a sign of a resurgent Taliban, he said "These are pinpricks that they keep doing and we have to manage all of that."
      
Musharraf also raised the Kashmir issue and said this along with Palestine have to be resolved to get rid of the option of war forever. "War is an expensive element and it is no mor eoption for any country," he said.