JNN Oct21st.2011.Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Friday plunges into new talks to press US demands for Islamabad to dismantle Taliban safe havens, while appealing to Pakistan’s deeply mistrustful public at large.
JNN Oct21st.2011.The visiting top US diplomat will meet separately with President Asif Ali Zardari and Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar, after four hours of talks Thursday involving military, intelligence and civilian leaders from both sides.
In a town-hall style forum to be broadcast live on television, Clinton will also engage Friday in a give-and-take with the Pakistani public, which should involve scores of civil society leaders, women and business leaders.
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 neighbouring 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 State Department official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
Since abandoning Afghanistan’s Taliban in 2001 and hitching its fortunes to the US-led war on terror, Pakistan has received billions in US military and civilian aid. But America’s image among ordinary Pakistanis remains dire.
Many Pakistanis, while angry at homegrown militant violence and at their own fractured leadership, blame the United States as the fount of their troubles. A daily diet of anti-US media conspiracy theories feed the climate of mistrust.
A Pew Research Center survey in June said just eight percent of Pakistanis had confidence in US President Barack Obama “to do the right thing in world affairs” — as low as George W. Bush’s rating at the end of his presidency.
Pakistani-US relations have deteriorated dramatically this year over the May 2 American 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.
The then top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, called the militant Haqqani network the “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and accused its spies of being involved in the embassy siege.
On Thursday, Clinton, CIA director David Petraeus and Mullen’s successor Martin Dempsey met for four hours with ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha, Pakistani army chief 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.
She warned militants that “we are going to seek you in your safe havens” on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, and confirmed a “major military operation” had been underway against the Haqqani network.
Pakistan disagrees with the US strategy, believing that military operations offer limited gains and that now is the time to concentrate on a comprehensive reconciliation ahead of a NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2014.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani urged Clinton to “give peace a chance” as envisaged in a Pakistani conference last month that opposed increasing US pressure for action against the Haqqani group.
Afghan peace efforts swerved off course last month with the assassination of former president and chief peace mediator Burhanuddin Rabbani.
President Karzai spoke of “shifting the focus” of the peace effort to Pakistan, saying that its establishment controls the Taliban to a “very, very great extent”.
Pakistani security officials say privately that contacts are maintained with insurgent groups to facilitate any eventual settlement in Afghanistan — a possibility that would be squandered if it launched any new offensive.
Islamabad argues that it has made tremendous sacrifices, losing 3,000 soldiers and thousands of civilians in bomb attacks on its soil, and that it cannot accede to US demands when the relationship is so unpopular.
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