The US wants and expects more from Pakistan in the fight against insurgents and is ready to offer additional assistance if Islamabad asks, two senior officials from US President Barack Obama’s administration said on Friday.
“We’ve gotten more cooperation and it’s been a real sea change in the commitment we’ve seen from the Pakistan government, [but] we want more. We expect more,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CBS’ 60 Minutes in an interview, excerpts of which were released on Friday.
She added that Washington had also warned of “severe consequences” if a successful attack in the US were traced back to Pakistan. She did not elaborate.
Investigations into the Pakistan-born suspect in the May 1 failed bombing attempt in New York’s Times Square have uncovered possible links to the Pakistani Taliban and a Kashmiri Islamist group.
That has prompted speculation Washington, Pakistan’s top provider of aid, could press Islamabad to open risky new fronts against Islamic militants.
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking to reporters on a trip to Kansas, however, appeared to play down the chances of an expanded Pakistani crackdown on insurgents.
He pointed to the strain on security forces already battling militants in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
“With their military operations in the west, they’ve started to be pretty thinly stretched themselves, as well as taking a substantial number of casualties,” Gates said.
The US was ready to step up assistance to Pakistan, he said.
“We’re willing to do as much ... as they are willing to accept,” Gates said. “We are prepared to do training and exercise with them. How big that operation becomes is really up to them.”
Citing anti-US sentiment in Pakistan, Gates added: “They [Pakistan’s leaders] are also very interested in keeping our footprints as small as possible, at least for now.”
The Obama administration has repeatedly praised Pakistani military operations over the past year, including the recent capture in Pakistan of the Afghan Taliban’s No. 2, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
Clinton said it marked an improvement from the “double game going on in the previous years, where we got a lot of lip service, but very little produced.”
“We have seen the killing or capturing of a great number of the leadership of significant terrorist groups and we’re going [to] continue that,” she said.
The US, which sees Pakistan’s effort against militants as crucial to its fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, has about 200 military personnel in Pakistan, including Special Operations forces on a training mission.
The CIA is also waging a covert war using pilotless drone aircraft to target insurgents in Pakistan.
“I think cooperation has continued to [improve], the relationship is continuing to improve and I think we just keep moving in that direction,” Gates said.
A White House official said the US had been working with Pakistan and would keep assisting a Pakistani offensive to root out the Taliban.
“We’ve been working on the other side of the border, of course, with Pakistan, in developing a strong partnership in which they have gone on the offensive — the largest offensive they’ve undertaken in some years — in order to root out extremists within their borders, including the Taliban,” US Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters.
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where