Pakistan Resists Call by U.S. to Root Out Militants
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: January 21, 2010
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — The Pakistani Army indicated Thursday that it would not launch any new offensives against extremists in the mountainous region of North Waziristan for at least six months, pushing back against calls by the United States to root out militants staging attacks along the Afghan border.
An Army spokesman described Pakistan’s position as the United States secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, arrived here for an unannounced two-day visit. Mr. Gates said that he planned to urge top Pakistani military officials to pursue extremist groups along their border, and that ignoring “one part of this cancer” would threaten the entire country’s stability.
But the Army spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, told American reporters at the headquarters of the Pakistani Army in the garrison city of Rawalpindi that Pakistan had to contain some of the extremist groups in the wake of offensives against Taliban fighters last year. General Abbas said it would be six months to a year before any new operation began, and said the situation was not as “black and white” as Mr. Gates described.
Mr. Gates, who is on his first trip to Pakistan in three years, was to meet on Thursday with the Pakistani Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, as well as the director of the country’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha.
He is also to attend a dinner in his honor given by the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, and deliver a speech on American policy before a military audience.
In an opinion article published on Thursday in The News, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily newspaper, Mr. Gates sounded a theme similar to his remarks to reporters, saying that Pakistan had to do more to fight the multiple extremist groups on its Afghan border.
Implicitly he pressed Pakistan to root out the Afghan Taliban leadership, the Quetta Shura, which has found refuge in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province outside the tribal areas. American officials are increasingly frustrated that while the Pakistanis have launched offensives against the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, they have so far not pursued the Afghan Taliban and another extremist group on their border, the Haqqani network, whose fighters pose a threat to American forces.
“Maintaining a distinction between some violent extremist groups and others is counterproductive,” Mr. Gates wrote. “Only by pressuring all of these groups on both sides of the border will Afghanistan and Pakistan be able to rid themselves of this scourge for good.”
American officials privately say that the Pakistanis are reluctant to go after the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network because they see them as a future proxy against Indian interests in Afghanistan when the Americans leave. India is Pakistan’s archrival in the region; under President Obama’s Afghan strategy, announced last month, the United States is to begin withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan by July 2011.
In the same article, Mr. Gates sought to reassure Pakistanis that Americans were interested in a long-term interest in their country, not just in short-term strategic gain across the border in Afghanistan. Mr. Gates said he regretted past injustices in the American-Pakistan relationship that he himself has been part of since the late 1980s, when as No. 2 at the C.I.A. he helped funnel covert Reagan administration aid and weapons through Pakistan’s spy agency to the Islamic fundamentalists who ousted the Russians from Afghanistan. Some of those fundamentalists are now part of the Taliban and fighting against the United States.
Mr. Gates said that the United States largely abandoned Afghanistan and cut military ties with Pakistan once the Russians left Kabul, which he called “a grave mistake driven by some well-intentioned but short-sighted U.S. legislative and policy decisions.”
He said on this visit “I will emphasize that the United States wishes to relinquish the grievances of the past.”
Source:
Pakistan Resists Call by U.S. to Root Out Militants - NYTimes.com
Just to throw in another perspective.
PS. Just note the moods in the pic.
