Senator John Kerry tried on Monday to lower the temperature in the fraught American Pakistani relationship in the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden raid, saying that the two sides would work together despite the anti-American clamor by the Pakistani government in the last two weeks.
Mr. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has argued that it would be foolhardy for the United States to cut assistance to Pakistan, said that Pakistan had agreed to take “several immediate steps” to show its seriousness. These included returning the tail of the helicopter that crashed on the night of the Bin Laden raid.
But on the major differences at hand, Mr. Kerry declined to specify what if any progress had been made.
On the key issue of whether Pakistan would stop assisting the Haqqani network, whose forces keep sanctuaries in Pakistan’s tribal areas and cross into Afghanistan to kill American and NATO soldiers, Mr. Kerry offered little light.
The senator, who came to Pakistan with the backing of the White House, said he had discussed the presence of the Haqqani forces in Pakistan, as well as Pakistan’s support for the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, and for Mullah Omar, the spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban, with the head of the Pakistan army, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha.
“We discussed every single one of them,” Mr. Kerry said, adding that Pakistani action against them would help the United States end the war in Afghanistan. But he was not willing, he said, to talk in public about issues that the Pakistani military had shown little interest in resolving.
On Sunday, Mr. Kerry visited Khost Province in Afghanistan where American commanders briefed him on the Pakistani insurgents coming across the order. It appeared that Mr. Kerry planned to use that evidence in his discussions on Monday with the Pakistani leadership.
In an unusual joint Pakistani-American statement negotiated Monday afternoon at a meeting attended by President Asif Ali Zardari and General Kayani, the main demand of the Pakistanis appeared to be a pledge that the United States had “no designs against Pakistan’s nuclear and strategic assets.”
“Senator Kerry stated that he was prepared to personally affirm such a guarantee,” the statement said.
The Pakistani military has complained bitterly that the Americans did not inform them in advance of the Bin Laden raid, and part of Mr. Kerry’s mission involved soothing wounded feelings, and papering over American officials’ statements that Pakistan could not be trusted with advance knowledge.
Pakistani officials have said they had no idea that Bin Laden, the world’s most-wanted terrorist leader, was living in a compound in the military garrison town of Abbottabad, where Navy Seal commandos killed him in a May 2 raid. “Even in the U.S. government, very few people knew about it,” the joint statement said of the Bin Laden operation.
The senator, who is the author of the major $7.5 billion package of civilian aid to Pakistan, said he had warned the Pakistani leadership of the “grave” worry in Congress about the presence of Bin Laden in Pakistan. Those concerns were putting future aid in peril, Mr. Kerry said.
Mr. Kerry’s calming tone was apparently echoed Monday when editors of some of Pakistan’s newspapers met with General Kayani.
In contrast to the strong anti-American presentation to parliament by General Pasha on Friday, General Kayani said that Pakistan would continue a relationship with the United States because otherwise the country risked becoming isolated, said an editor who attended, but who declined to be named because the matter was politically delicate.
“Pakistan understood the limits of its own reach,” was General Kayani’s basic message, the editor said.
Moreover, Pakistan needed to remain on good terms with the United States in order to have its say in the settlement of the nearly 10-year-old war in Afghanistan, the general said, according to the editor’s account.
No comments:
Post a Comment