Pakistan warned the US it risks losing an ally if it continued to accuse Islamabad of playing a double game in the war against militancy, escalating the crisis in relations between the two countries.
Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar was responding to comments by Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, who said Pakistan’s top spy agency was closely tied to the Haqqani network, the most violent and effective faction among Taliban militants in Afghanistan.
It is the most serious allegation leveled by the US against nuclear-armed and Muslim-majority Pakistan since they began an alliance in the “war on terror” a decade ago.
“You will lose an ally,” Khar told Geo TV in New York in remarks broadcast yesterday. “You cannot afford to alienate Pakistan, you cannot afford to alienate the Pakistani people. If you are choosing to do so and if they are choosing to do so it will be at their [the US’] own cost.”
Mullen, speaking in a US Senate testimony, alleged Haqqani operatives launched an attack last week on the US embassy in Kabul with the support of Pakistan’s military intelligence.
The tensions could have repercussions across Asia, from India, Pakistan’s economically booming archrival, to China, which has edged closer to Islamabad in recent years.
A complete break between the US and Pakistan — sometimes friends, often adversaries — seems unlikely, if only because Washington depends on Pakistan as a route to supply US troops fighting militants in Afghanistan, and as a base for unmanned US drones.
Pakistan relies on Washington for military and economic aid and for acting as a backer on the world stage.
However, support in the US Congress for curbing assistance or making conditions on aid more stringent is rising rapidly.
The unilateral US Navy SEALs raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May took already fragile relations between Pakistan and the US to a low.
Relations were just starting to recover before the Kabul attack. Both sides are now engaged in an unusually blunt public war of words.
The dangers could be enormous if Washington fails to arrest the deterioration in relations with Pakistan.
At stake are the fight against terrorism, the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and — as Islamabad plays off its friendship with China against the US — regional stability.
“Anything which is said about an ally, about a partner, publicly to recriminate it, to humiliate it, is not acceptable,” Khar said.
The US has long pressed Pakistan to go after the Haqqani network, which it believes operates from sanctuaries in North Waziristan on the Afghan border.
Pakistan says its army is too stretched fighting its own Taliban insurgency, but analysts say Islamabad regards the Haqqanis as a strategic counterweight to the growing influence of old rival India in Afghanistan.
The Haqqani network, Mullen said, is a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence.
The charges come amid mounting exasperation in Washington as US President Barack Obama’s administration struggles to curb militancy in Pakistan and end the long war in Afghanistan.
Mullen, CIA director David Petraeus and US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have all met with their Pakistani counterparts in recent days to demand Islamabad take action against the Haqqani network.
Any Pakistani offensive against the Haqqanis would be risky. The group has an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 seasoned fighters at its disposal and analysts say the Pakistan Army would likely suffer heavy casualties.
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