US Senator John Kerry Tuesday said Pakistan admitted that things went wrong and mistakes were made.
“They’re going to try to get at it. I’m convinced that they want to find out because they want to hold those folks accountable,” said Kerry after returning from a whirlwind visit to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Amid US public anger that bin Laden was tracked to a Pakistani garrison town nearly 10 years after the September 11 terrorist strikes, and corresponding pressure on US lawmakers to cut aid to Islamabad, Kerry said Pakistani leaders had pledged new efforts to cooperate with Washington. “They are concrete, they are precise, they are measurable and they are in many cases joint, and we will know precisely what is happening with them in very, very short order,” he said.
“I’m very, very confident about a number of those things having a major impact on the things we need to do,” said Kerry, who promised to detail the new initiatives to his colleagues in a closed-door session expected next week.But he promised to pursue policy in Afghanistan to the best of ability no matter what but said the Pakistanis “hold the key to the fastest, least costly, most effective drawdown”.
Pakistan, under renewed US pressure since the death of Osama bin Laden, is stepping up its efforts to battle extremists and help stabilise Afghanistan, he added. “Some of them are important things that are very important to us strategically, but they are not appropriate to discuss publicly,” said the Democratic lawmaker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Kerry said he had heard ‘frustration’ from top Pakistani officials about the US raid that killed the al Qaeda leader, but had made clear Washington expected more from its ally. “This relationship will not be measured by words or by communiqués after meetings like the ones that I engaged in. It will only be measured by actions,” said the Democratic lawmaker.
Kerry said Pakistan’s role would affect Obama’s plans to start withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan in July and hand over security to Afghan forces in 2014, a deadline seen by some in Islamabad as Washington abandoning the region. Kerry said high-level US-Pakistan talks ‘that will begin very, very soon’ would touch on ‘some larger issues’. If they go well then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will decide “when and if” to visit Pakistan, he added.
The senator, who is sometimes discussed as a possible successor to Clinton, said he had no indication during his trip to Islamabad that high-level Pakistani officials had been complicit in hiding bin Laden.
Islamabad accepts mistakes: Kerry
