Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari says that the United States' support for dictators over some past decades is blamed for the ongoing insurgency in Pakistan, Press TV reported.
Zardari wrote in an unusually harsh article published in The Washington Post on Monday that "Dancing with dictators never pays off."
The president accused Washington of throwing its support behind the non-elected governments in different parts of the world.
"The West, most notably the United States, has been all too willing to dance with dictators in pursuit of perceived short-term goals. The litany of these policies and their consequences clutter the earth, from the Marcos regime in the Philippines, to the Shah in Iran, to Mohammed Ziaul Haq and Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan."
The president noted that the US and its western allies in the late '70s stood by a military ruler who toppled a democratically elected government in Pakistan.
"It empowered a Gen. Zia dictatorship that brutalized its people, decimated our political parties, murdered the prime minister who had founded Pakistan's largest political party, and destroyed the press and civil society."
General Zia came to power after he overthrew ruling Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in a military coup d'état in 1977 and became the state's third ruler to impose martial law.
"Frankly, the worst democracy is better than any dictatorship. Dictatorship leads to frustration, extremism and terrorism."
Zardari emphasized that the West used my nation as a blunt instrument of the cold war during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
"And once the Soviets were defeated, the Americans took the next bus out of town, leaving behind a political vacuum that ultimately led to the Talibanization and radicalization of Afghanistan, the birth of Al Qaeda and the current jihadist insurrection in Pakistan."
Islamabad had lost more soldiers -- 1,200 -- fighting the insurgents in Pakistan than all of the countries of NATO have lost, combined, fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Zardari wrote.
The tone and the content of the article surprised many in Washington. The article has caused some to rethink whether relations between Islamabad and Washington were still as friendly as both sides say.