ISLAMABAD, Oct 21, (Agencies): The United States called on Pakistan Friday to take action within “days and weeks” on dismantling Afghan militant havens and encouraging the Taleban into peace talks in order to end 10 years of war.
Crucially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared to extract recognition from Pakistan that it could do more in clamping down on Afghan insurgents using Pakistani soil to attack Americans but it offered no details on how.
The top US diplomat spent Friday locked in talks with Pakistani leaders following a four-hour session late Thursday in neighbouring Afghanistan designed to quicken an end to one of America’s longest wars.
Unusually accompanied by CIA director David Petraeus and the top US military officer General Martin Dempsey, she said Islamabad has a “critical role in supporting Afghanistan reconciliation and ending the conflict”.
“We look to Pakistan to take strong steps to deny Afghan insurgents safe havens and to encourage the Taleban to enter negotiations in good faith,” said Clinton after talks with Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar.
The United States was looking for operational action over “not months and years, but days and weeks because we have a lot of work to do to realise our shared goals,” emphasised Clinton.
Relations between Pakistan and the United States deteriorated dramatically over the May 2 American special forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad and US accusations over the Sept 13 US embassy siege in Kabul.
The then top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, called the militant Haqqani network a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and accused its spies of being involved in the embassy siege.
In response, Pakistani leaders united behind calls to “give peace a chance” but Clinton said that in order to do that, “we have some work to do”.
With US and Afghan troops pressing a new offensive against the Haqqani network in eastern Afghanistan, Clinton called on Pakistan to up the pressure on militant safe havens on its side of the border.
“We asked very specifically for greater cooperation from the Pakistani side to squeeze the Haqqani network and other terrorists... Trying to eliminate terrorists and safe havens on one side of the border is not going to work.
“It’s like that old story: you can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors... Eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard.”
Pakistan has so far refused to open a new offensive against the Haqqani network in its leadership base in North Waziristan, arguing that its troops are too overstretched and that the country has already sacrificed too many lives.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Friday that efforts to stabilise Afghanistan would focus on getting the Taleban and the al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network to pursue peace, but warned stern action must be taken if they don’t cooperate.
“Now we have to turn our attention here on the Pakistani Taliban, Afghan Taliban, Haqqani and other terrorist groups and try to get them into a peace process,” Clinton told a news conference during a visit to Pakistan, a nation seen as critical to US efforts to end the conflict in Afghanistan.
“But if that failed, prevent them from committing more violence and murdering more innocent people,” she said.