US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday plunged into new talks to press US demands for Islamabad to dismantle Taliban safe havens, while appealing to Pakistan’s deeply mistrustful general public.
The visiting top US diplomat met Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar ahead of separate talks with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, following four hours of talks on Thursday involving military, intelligence and civilian leaders from both sides.
In a town-hall style forum to be broadcast live on TV, where at a similar event two years ago she heard US drone attacks compared to terrorism, Clinton will also engage directly with Pakistani civil society leaders.
Photo: AFP
US officials said Clinton would reiterate her strongly worded arguments about the need for Pakistan to dismantle safe havens on its soil, which are used by militants fighting US-led troops in neighboring Afghanistan.
“She’ll make essentially the same types of points, but she’ll make it in a more conversational, populist style and then she’ll take questions, because we really do want to engage with the Pakistani public,” one senior official said.
“And we want to ensure that we are really having a dialogue about our relationship going forward because we both have a lot at stake here,” the US State Department official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
Since siding with the US-led “war on terror” in 2001, Pakistan has received billions in US aid, but seen a huge surge in insecurity — losing 3,000 soldiers in battle with the Taliban and thousands of civilians in bomb attacks.
Many Pakistanis, while angry at homegrown violence and at their own unpopular leaders, consider the US to be the fount of their troubles.
They feel the US abandoned Pakistan after the 1980s war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and fear Washington will walk away again after withdrawing combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014.
A covert US drone war in the tribal belt, which the government has approved, has fanned tensions and a diet of conspiracy theories propagated by mosques, the media and public figures magnifies the distrust.
A Pew Research Center survey in June said just 8 percent of Pakistanis had confidence in US President Barack Obama “to do the right thing in world affairs” — as low as former US president George W. Bush’s rating at the end of his presidency.
Pakistani-US relations deteriorated dramatically this year over the May 2 US special forces raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden near Islamabad and accusations over a lengthy US embassy siege in Kabul last month.
Then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen called the militant Haqqani network the “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and accused its spies of being involved in the embassy siege.
On Thursday, Clinton, CIA Director David Petraeus and Mullen’s successor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, met ISI Director Ahmad Shuja Pasha, Pakistani Army Chief of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani and Khar.
“It was extremely frank, the discussion was very detailed,” the US official told reporters after the talks, which followed a visit by Clinton to Kabul.
“We intend to push the Pakistanis very hard as to what they are willing and able to do with us ... to remove the safe havens and the continuing threats across the border to Afghans,” Clinton said at talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
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