US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen is likely to arrive here on July 24 (Sunday) to hold crucial talks with Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and other military commanders on the restoration of full intelligence cooperation between Islamabad and Washington in the fight against al Qaeda and Taliban militants.
Mullen will visit Islamabad in the wake of high-level Pakistan-US contacts in recent days including the trip to Washington by Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Chief Lt General Ahmad Shuja Pasha to iron out serious differences between the two states on various aspects of the war on terror.
It was before that visit that General James Mattis, the head of US Central Command, met here with General Kayani and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Chairman General Khalid Shameem Wynne. After the ISI chief’s trip to Washington the designated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief General David Petraeus also met General Kayani.
Such high-level meetings and the ISI chief’s Washington trip helped ease tensions in relations between the two states, with both sides resolving to do away with their differences on drone strikes in Pakistani tribal regions, return of US military trainers and CIA operatives to Pakistan in large numbers and also the operations of the US spy agency on Pakistani soil while keeping Pakistan in the dark. “Admiral Mullen will carry forward the dialogue process started by Islamabad and Washington to settle their issues in his talks here with Pakistan’s top military commanders,” a security official here told Pakistan Today on condition of anonymity. He said it was hoped that both sides would be able to reach some understanding on how to move forward and continue with the counter-terrorism cooperation, the most important aspect of which was intelligence cooperation between the ISI and CIA.
The tensions between Pakistan and the US were further exacerbated when the Obama administration suspended $800 million in military aid to Pakistan last week.
Before that, ties between the two allies were strained in the wake of a May 2 covert raid by US special forces to kill al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. It was after that raid that Pakistan ordered the American military trainers out of the country and halted bilateral cooperation.
Pakistani authorities asked the US to call back all CIA operatives to Washington after Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor, killed two Pakistanis in Lahore in January this year. Some recent US media reports, however, suggested Pakistan had issued visas to well over 80 CIA personnel of late.
“Admiral Mullen is also likely to once again urge Pakistan’s military leaders to carry out a full-fledged military operation in the restive tribal region of North Waziristan to dismantle the dangerous Taliban-linked militant faction known as the Haqqani network,” the official said.