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Islamabad needs more time: official

Pakistan's new ambassador to the US is urging patience for those in Washington frustrated with his government's pursuit of peace deals with tribes along the lawless Pakistani-Afghan border.

Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani said in an interview on Friday that the US should judge the outcome of talks being conducted by Pakistan’s “fledgling democracy,” not the often contentious process of negotiating.

That may be difficult advice for US critics who say the peace talks have removed military pressure from the region and allowed Taliban and al-Qaida militants to regroup and stage attacks on US and allied forces operating in Afghanistan.

Haqqani said the Pakistani government, which won February elections against the party of staunch US ally President Pervez Musharraf, is working to strike agreements that would require the tribes to give up their weapons, withdraw support for foreign fighters in their midst and “end attacks inside Pakistan, across the border and around the world.”

“These are our own people,” said the ambassador, who once served as an adviser to former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif.

“We cannot, just because somebody in the United States wants us to, just go and start bombing them, without at least going through the process of showing our desire to negotiate in good faith,” he said.

A poll released on Friday showed strong public support in Pakistan for negotiating with militants in the tribal regions rather than fighting them. Meanwhile, tensions between the US and Pakistan have been high since a US air strike last week killed 11 Pakistani border troops.

US and Afghan officials say remnants of Afghanistan’s Taliban militia are sheltering in Pakistan, which Pakistan denies. Militants based in Pakistani tribal areas, where Osama bin Laden and his top aides are believed to be hiding, say they are sending fighters into Afghanistan.

Robert Hathaway, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Asia program, said ties between Pakistan and the US were “very troubled.”

“Suspicions between the American military and the Pakistani military are the highest they’ve been in many years and there’s a great deal of uneasiness in the United States because the new government in Pakistan seems to be bogged down and incapable of dealing with many of the serious issues confronting the country,” Hathaway said in an interview.

Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, triggered anger in Pakistan last year when he said that he might authorize US troops to strike unilaterally in Pakistan if they located bin Laden.

Addressing Obama’s comments, Haqqani said Pakistan understood that it was “a rhetorical answer to a hypothetical question and not a statement of policy.”

He said, however, that “anyone thinking unilateral strikes inside Pakistan are a good idea needs to re-examine that position.” Such an attack would “only infuriate the Pakistani public” and turn more people to extremism and against the United States.

In Friday’s interview, the ambassador also touched on the case of Abdul Qadeer Khan, a hero in the eyes of many Pakistanis for his key role in developing the Islamic nation’s nuclear bomb. Khan admitted in 2004 that he had operated a network that spread nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
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