Afghanistan’s president warned Wednesday that the whole world could suffer from the “wildfire” of terrorism engulfing his region, a grim message for a meeting of political and business leaders already fretting over the threat of global recession.
Hamid Karzai addresses the opening session of the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.
Formally opening the World Economic Forum, Hamid Karzai gave a sobering rundown of recent attacks attributed to Islamic extremists — among them the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and bombings in Afghanistan and Pakistan that have killed hundreds, including many children.
With militant violence still on the rise in the two nations six years after the ouster of the Taliban, “it seems like the mutant of extremism is dangerously unleashed across the region,” Karzai said. The trend “bodes terribly badly for the whole world,” he said.
In an apparent allusion to Pakistan — whose president, Pervez Musharraf, originally supported the Taliban — Karzai called terrorism “a venomous snake that some among us tried to nurture and befriend at the expense of others, which I hope we realize now was a mistake.”