Pakistan ‘won’t launch’ Haqqani offensive

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s army chief on Monday scrapped a visit to London as Islamabad refused to bow to mounting US demands for action against al Qaeda-linked Haqqani extremists holed up in the country’s northwest.

The alliance between Pakistan and the United States in the 10-year war in Afghanistan and against al Qaeda hit rock bottom this year in the wake of the unilateral American raid that killed Osama bin Laden near Islamabad on May 2.

In a series of escalating rows, Washington accused Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency of involvement in the September 13 attack on its embassy in Kabul and a September 11 attack on a NATO base in central Afghanistan.

The White House has since demanded that Pakistan “break any link they have” with the Haqqani network, which was founded by former CIA asset Jalaluddin Haqqani and is run by his son Sirajuddin - based in North Waziristan.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence said Pakistan’s chief of army staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, had cancelled a visit to London where he had been expected to meet Defence Secretary Liam Fox.

Pakistani army spokesman General Athar Abbas said the visit had been “postponed indefinitely” but would be re-scheduled. Abbas put the decision down to “the current situation at home” but refused to elaborate further.

Kayani, who faced huge internal pressures over the bin Laden raid, on Sunday called his top generals for an extraordinary meeting about the stinging US rebukes blaming the Haqqanis and Pakistani intelligence for recent attacks.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has called a rare cross-party conference for Thursday, although he dismissed the American allegations as little more than finding a scapegoat for US “disarray” in Afghanistan.

Gilani’s office said he had directed Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar to forcefully project Pakistan’s point of view at the UN General Assembly, which she is expected to address on Tuesday.

US ambassador Cameron Munter on Monday met with Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Salman Bashir. There was no official word on the meeting but state-run television quoted a foreign office spokesperson as saying, “Pakistan and US agreed to remove misunderstandings through close contacts and bilateral talks.”

The Karachi Stock Exchange’s benchmark KSE-100 index shed three percent to close at 11,265.03, a slump dealers put down to agitation over the US-Pakistani tensions.

“I don’t think the indicators are as such,” a senior Pakistani security official told AFP when asked if the army was going to launch an operation in North Waziristan, part of the country’s semi-autonomous tribal belt.

Instead, he said, the military needs to “consolidate gains” made against local militants who pose a security threat elsewhere in the tribal region that Washington has branded an al Qaeda headquarters.

General James Mattis, commander of the US Central Command which oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on Sunday became the most senior US commander to hold talks with Pakistani generals in Islamabad since last week’s public US accusations of Pakistani involvement with the Haqqanis.

In a curt statement after the talks, the Pakistani military said it was committed to achieving “enduring peace in the region” - something it said was only possible “through mutual trust and cooperation”.

But the Pakistani official told AFP that troops were too busy countering cross-border attacks from Afghanistan and local Pakistani militants in other parts of the tribal belt to take on the Haqqanis.

“These are kind of more pressing issues that we have to tackle,” the security official said.

Last week, the outgoing top US military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, bluntly accused Pakistan of “exporting” violent extremism to Afghanistan through proxies and warned of possible action to protect US troops.

The Pakistani official who spoke to AFP confirmed there were “indirect contacts” with the Haqqanis but denied that the intelligence services provided support or endorsed their attacks. afp