Clinton hails Pakistani resolve in battling Taliban

USA TODAY
SAN SALVADOR — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday she's impressed by the Pakistani army's assault on Taliban militants who had captured much of Pakistan's Swat Valley.
"I am incredibly heartened by the resolve shown the Pakistani people, government and military," Clinton said in an interview with USA TODAY. She was in El Salvador for the inauguration of President Mauricio Funes.

Pakistan's army has attacked Taliban strongholds throughout the Swat Valley.

Members of the Taliban, the fundamentalist Muslim movement that ruled Afghanistan until its ouster in 2001, had moved into the Swat Valley and gradually taken control.

In April, Clinton told a congressional committee that the Pakistani government of President Asif Ali Zardari "is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists."

Since then, Pakistani troops have attacked the Taliban throughout the region and will have cleared them from major cities and towns in a matter of days, said Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a Pakistani army spokesman.

The military has recaptured Mingora, the Swat Valley's main urban center. Abbas said clearing rural areas could take months.

Clinton disagreed Monday with Zardari's complaints in a recent interview that the United States has not delivered on its promises of aid to Pakistan. "We have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs or revive the economy. What are we supposed to do?" Zardari said in the interview in The New York Review of Books

"I certainly understand the anxiety of anyone in Pakistan; they have taken on this really important challenge of trying to take on the Taliban, but we've been providing aid. We already disbursed $110 million for the displaced people. We've got that out very quickly," Clinton said. "So I think it may be moving more quickly than perhaps the president knows, but there's a lot more to be done, and we're going to try to tee it up and get it delivered as quickly as possible."

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, will travel to Pakistan this week to meet with officials, said Robert Wood, State Department deputy spokesman.

Today, Pakistani troops rescued dozens of students, teachers and staff from a boys school who had been taken captive by militants in the northwest, the Pakistani military said.

Abbas said 80 people, 71 of them students, were found by forces in the Goryam area.

"An exchange of fire took place, but the miscreants-terrorists fled the scene when they saw the strength of the armed forces," he said.