Pakistan’s army chief General Ashfaq Kayani vowed to defeat terrorism and rejected the notion of Islamabad “not doing enough” in the anti-Taliban fight, the military said on Thursday.
His comments followed remarks by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairperson of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, accusing Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of having ties with Afghan Taliban in Pakistan’s north-west tribal belt.
The White House also criticised Pakistan’s efforts to defeat the Taliban operating on the border in a report this month refuted by Islamabad.
The army chief “strongly rejected negative propaganda of Pakistan not doing enough and Pakistan army’s lack of clarity on the way forward”, the military said in a statement, a day after Mullen met top generals in Islamabad.
Kayani said that the “army’s ongoing operations are a testimony of our national resolve to defeat terrorism”, according to the statement.
In an interview with private TV channel Geo, Mullen — the highest ranking officer in the US armed forces — said: “ISI has a long-standing relationship with the Haqqani network, that does not mean everybody in ISI but it is there”.
The statement did not mention the Haqqani network.
The army defended its stance against terrorism in general and acknowledged that a “trust deficit between the institutions as well as the people” existed between the US and Pakistan.
But Kayani and Mullen re-stated their aims of building “reciprocal respect towards each other’s sovereignty” and the statement said “security ties will not be allowed to unravel between the two armed forces”.
Al-Qaeda-allied organisation
The Haqqani network is an al-Qaeda-allied organisation run by Afghan warlord Sirajuddin Haqqani and based in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal district.
The group has been blamed for some of the deadliest anti-US attacks in Afghanistan, including a suicide attack at a US base in Khost in 2009 that killed seven CIA operatives.
Kayani said public support was key to success in the war against terrorism but said that controversial US drone strikes “not only undermine our national effort against terrorism but also turn public support against our efforts”.
The drone strikes inflame anti-US feeling, which is running high after the January killing of two Pakistani men in a busy Lahore street by a US embassy official later revealed to be working for the CIA.
Missile attacks doubled last year, with more than 100 drone strikes killing over 670 people in 2010 compared with 45 strikes that killed 420 in 2009, according to an Agence France-Presse tally.
Most have been concentrated in North Waziristan, the most notorious Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda bastion in Pakistan, where the US wants the Pakistan military to launch a ground offensive as soon as possible.
Pakistan says its troops are too overstretched to launch such an assault.
Mullen’s trip is the latest shuttle diplomacy mission after a fatal shooting by a CIA contractor in January triggered a row between the US and Pakistan over intelligence sharing and raised tensions over the controversial US drone war. — AFP