US, Pakistan try to salvage ties

CHRIS BRUMMITT

Asso­ci­ated Press

ISLAMABAD — A top U.S. emis­sary warned Pak­istan on Mon­day that “actions not words” are needed to tackle mil­i­tant sanc­tu­ar­ies, as the two coun­tries tried to sal­vage their rela­tion­ship two weeks after the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden in a gar­ri­son town close to the national capital.

Sen. John Kerry, the first high-level Amer­i­can offi­cial to visit Islam­abad since the May 2 death of the al-Qaida leader, said Pak­istan agreed to take sev­eral “spe­cific steps” imme­di­ately to improve ties.

But he did not say whether those steps include what the U.S. wants most: action against the Haqqani net­work and other Tal­iban fac­tions shel­ter­ing in Pak­istan and killing Amer­i­can troops in neigh­bor­ing Afghanistan.

Although the United States says it has no evi­dence that Pakistan’s civil or mil­i­tary lead­er­ship knew of bin Laden’s where­abouts, the knowl­edge that the U.S. might find some evi­dence in the doc­u­ments seized in the ter­ror leader’s com­pound has given it new lever­age over Islamabad.

Pak­istan has long balked at U.S. requests to crack down on Afghan Tal­iban fac­tions on its soil. The Tal­iban and al-Qaida have close ties, and sus­pi­cions over Pak­istani com­plic­ity in hid­ing bin Laden have fos­tered fur­ther ques­tions about whether Pak­istan is not only tol­er­at­ing but per­haps even sup­port­ing other militants.

Kerry noted that sev­eral mem­bers of the U.S. Con­gress no longer want to autho­rize U.S. aid to Pak­istan given the sus­pi­cions gen­er­ated by the bin Laden raid.

“Mem­bers of Con­gress are not con­fi­dent that things can be patched up again,” said Kerry, who chairs the U.S. Senate’s For­eign Rela­tions Com­mit­tee and is con­sid­ered a friend of Pak­istan. “That is why actions not words are going to be crit­i­cal to earn­ing their votes.”

Bin Laden’s hide­away in Abbot­tabad, which also houses Pakistan’s ver­sion of West Point, has com­pounded ques­tions in America’s eyes over this country’s reli­a­bil­ity as an ally. Pak­ista­nis reacted angrily to the U.S. incur­sion on their soil.

Kerry’s pub­lic com­ments and a later joint state­ment with Pakistan’s army and intel­li­gence chiefs after a series of meet­ings indi­cated will­ing­ness on both sides to sta­bi­lize a vital relationship.

Still, there were few imme­di­ate tan­gi­ble signs of progress.

Kerry said Pak­istan agreed to hand over the tail of a clas­si­fied stealth heli­copter that was destroyed by the Amer­i­can com­man­dos when it mal­func­tioned on the raid on bin Laden’s hide­away. He also said Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton would soon announce a trip to the country.

Late Mon­day, U.S. mis­siles fired from a drone hit a house and car a region close to the Afghan bor­der that is home to al-Qaida and Tal­iban lead­ers, killing seven mil­i­tants, Pak­istani intel­li­gence offi­cials said. The sus­pected iden­ti­ties of the dead in North Waziris­tan were not released.

The U.S. attack came two days after the Pak­istani par­lia­ment, fol­low­ing a debate dom­i­nated by anger over the bin Laden raid, demanded an end to the mis­sile strikes as well. The drone strikes are intensely unpop­u­lar among Pak­ista­nis but, at least in the past, have been car­ried out with the con­sent of Pak­istani author­i­ties. It was unclear if the lat­est attack would gen­er­ate more rancor.

Nom­i­nal allies since 2001 when Pak­istan sev­ered its links to the Tal­iban in Afghanistan and sup­ported the U.S.-led inva­sion, rela­tions between the two coun­tries have never been smooth. Many Pak­ista­nis are hos­tile to the United States and its pres­ence in Afghanistan.

Pak­istan allows the United States to truck much of its war sup­plies over its soil into Afghanistan. Its ties with Afghan Tal­iban fac­tions means it will also be impor­tant to nego­ti­at­ing an end to the war there, as Wash­ing­ton now believes is inevitable.

For its part, Pak­istan des­per­ately needs U.S. assis­tance to keep its econ­omy afloat and its army equipped against the threat it per­ceives from ris­ing regional giant India.

That means nei­ther the U.S. nor Pak­istan can afford a com­plete break in rela­tions regard­less of how tense the rela­tions become.

“We have got to get the job done (in Afghanistan), and we need Pakistan’s coop­er­a­tion, and they need ours,” Kerry told reporters. “And that’s where we need to work on and I think we have made a lot of progress on that.”

Mark Mor­rel, the deputy direc­tor of the CIA, and Marc Gross­man, the Obama administration’s envoy to Afghanistan and Pak­istan, are also expected to visit Pak­istan soon.

The Amer­i­can raid was ini­tially wel­comed by Pakistan’s pres­i­dent and prime min­is­ter, but the mood changed after a day or so when the army — the real power cen­ter in the coun­try — issued angry state­ments accus­ing the United States of vio­lat­ing its sovereignty.

Monday’s joint state­ment said both sides pledged to work together in any future actions against “high value tar­gets” in Pak­istan, appar­ently an attempt to pla­cate Pak­ista­nis angry that the army was not told in advance about the raid on bin Laden’s com­pound. The state­ment did not explic­itly rule out any more uni­lat­eral raids against al-Qaida and Tal­iban tar­gets in the coun­try, some­thing that Amer­i­can offi­cials have also declined to do in recent days.

“My goal in com­ing here is not to apol­o­gize for what I con­sider to be a tri­umph against ter­ror­ism of unprece­dented con­se­quence,” Kerry said. “My goal in com­ing here has been to talk about how we man­age this impor­tant relationship.”

Asso­ci­ated Press writ­ers Nahal Toosi and Sebas­t­ian Abbot con­tributed to this report.

Posted by AP News on May 16 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.