Clinton lauds Pakistan’s Qaeda crackdown

 WASHINGTON: Lauding Pakistan’s crackdown on al Qaeda, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Sunday said that Washington and Islamabad would work together for peace and security in Afghanistan as she also recognized the need to stem militants’ use of safe havens on the Afghan side for attacks against Pakistan.

Clinton, who led a high-level delegation for talks with top Pakistani political and military leaders this week for “intensive” discussions, said in a US TV channel interview that an level of mutual understanding between two allies is improving.


“We are very clear. We need to do two things together. We need to squeeze the terrorist networks, including the Haqqani network, out of their safe havens, preventing them from being able to plan and carry out attacks across the border.

“And we have to, on the Afghan side of the border, squeeze and eliminate safe havens of those who move back and forth and use safe havens in Afghanistan to attack Pakistan,” she said.

Islamabad has been for months asking the US-led international forces stationed in Afghanistan to stop Afghan-based militants from using safe havens in that country for attacks inside Pakistan.

Secondly, Clinton added in the interview, “we have to have a very firm commitment to an Afghan-led reconciliation peace process.”

“We are about 90-95 percent in agreement between the United States and Pakistan about the means of our moving toward what are our commonly shared goals and we have a work plan and real commitment to making sure we are as effective as possible together,” she told the channel’s State of the Union programme.

The chief US diplomat, who issued some tough statements ahead of her visit to Islamabad this week, also openly acknowledged the effectiveness of Pakistan’s cooperation against al-Qaeda militant organization.

“The cooperation on security that we have received over the past years from Pakistan has been absolutely essential in our efforts to defeat and disrupt the al-Qaeda network.”
The Pakistanis, she noted, themselves have suffered enormously as a result of their military actions against the terrorist networks and of course that has not only been only military losses but civilians to a total of about 30,000 over the last decade.