Military leaders meet to salvage Pak-US ties

The top Pakistani and US military leaders met in Spain to discuss ways to shore up strained ties, a Pentagon spokesman said.
Joint Chiefs of Staff General Ashfaq Kayani and his US counterpart Mike Mullen sat down for more than two hours of talks late Friday on the sidelines of a NATO conference in Seville, Mullen’s spokesman Captain John Kirby told sources.
“They agreed that the relationship between our two countries remained vital to the region and that both sides had taken positive steps to improve that relationship over the past few months,” Kirby said.
“They also discussed the state of military-to-military cooperation and pledged to continue to find ways to make it better.”
It was the first meeting between the pair since the May 2 nighttime military raid in which US Navy Seals entered the country without permission from Islamabad.
As relations worsened in the aftermath of the raid, Washington announced that it could cut some of the $2.7 billion in military aid it sends to Pakistan.
Islamabad, for its part, ordered as many as 200 US military trainers out of the country in the aftermath of the operation.
During his meeting with his Pakistani counterpart, Mullen expressed “deep concerns about the increasing — and increasingly brazen — activities of the Haqqani network and restated his strong desire to see the Pakistani military take action against them and their safe havens in North Waziristan,” said Kirby.
While relations are frayed, Pakistan is a key for US military operations in Afghanistan, where the United States is to trying to beat down a resilient Taliban insurgency.