Reuters/London
Pakistan has welcomed the idea of resuming co-operation with the United States on counter-terrorism and Afghanistan after its parliament reviews badly strained ties, a senior US official said yesterday.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meets with Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar at the London Conference on Somalia, yesterday
The official gave an upbeat assessment of talks between the US and Pakistani foreign ministers designed to help repair relations pushed deep into crisis by an incident in November when US aircraft killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar that the United States fully respected the Pakistani parliament’s need to review relations carefully but also stressed the need to resume joint work.
Clinton told Khar that “we had to get ready to get back into business with Pakistan and that was particularly important (on) areas such as counter-terrorism, working together on some of the regional questions, very much to include Afghanistan”, said the US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“The foreign minister was very welcoming of that,” the US official added as he briefed on the ministers’ one-hour, 15-minute meeting in London, where Clinton is attending a conference on Somalia.
The United States sees Pakistan as critical to its efforts to wind down the war in neighbouring Afghanistan, where US-led Nato forces are battling a stubborn Taliban insurgency.
In particular, it wants Pakistani co-operation in tackling the Haqqani network, the Afghan insurgent group now seen as the gravest threat to Nato and Afghan troops.
The attack on November 26 exacerbated a crisis that erupted after US special forces killed Osama bin Laden in an unannounced raid on Pakistani soil in May last year, and sent relations between the two countries to their chilliest levels in years. Ties were also severely hurt a year ago by the killing of two Pakistanis by a CIA contractor.
Before the London talks, Khar urged Washington on Tuesday to establish a “predictable, transparent and sustainable” relationship with Pakistan, adding that parliament was currently looking at “terms of re-engagement” with the United States.
Clinton raised the possibility of a series of US officials going to Pakistan once the review is complete to discuss, among other things, what kind of aid the United States may continue to give the Pakistani government, the US official said.
They could include special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Marc Grossman, Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, who oversees the State Department’s aid budget, and Rajiv Shah, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“We respect the parliament’s right to consider US-Pakistan relations, we certainly respect the parliament’s right to take the time to do this in a sensible way,” the US official said.
