Islamabad, Sept 29: Pakistan today hit back at Afghan President Hamid Karzai's accusations that some of its 10,000 Islamic schools were fuelling a Taliban resurgence, saying he was trying to find a scapegoat for his own failures. "Not a single student from our Madrassas has gone to Afghanistan since the fall of Taliban," said Fazlur Rehman, whose Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) party runs its own religious schools, called Madrassas. The JUI led fiery rallies in support of the Taliban during the late-2001 US-led military assault that led to the ousting of the hardline regime. "Karzai has failed to improve the system in Afghanistan and is now all alone. Thus in a bid to divert world's attention towards his failure he is accusing Pakistan and its Madrassas," Rehman told a news agency.

Karzai said several times in the United States last week that Taliban fighters have been finding support from radical Madrassas in Pakistan where they were allegedly regrouping and orchestrating attacks back inside Afghanistan.

Karzai complained to US President George W Bush that in some Pakistani Madrassas "There are still people that are preaching a kind of Talibanism and they come across" to Afghanistan, a US official quoted him saying.

The board of Islamic schools (Wafaq-ul-Madaris) also rejected Karzai's statement. "In a country where raids are being conducted to arrest Madrassa students and foreign students are leaving in droves, Karzai's accusations are baseless," the board's director, Mufti Mohammad Jamil, told a news agency.

Bureau Report