US warns Pakistan of ‘dire consequences’

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in an interview with Bloomberg News on Monday that Pakistan would suffer “dire consequences” if it failed to “contain” terrorists operating from its soil, and it needed the US and Afghanistan to help get the job done. The Obama administration was not asking Pakistan’s military to occupy its rugged border regions, the base for extremist groups that attack US, allied and Afghan forces on the other side, Clinton said following two days of meetings in Islamabad.
There were “different ways of fighting besides overt military action”, she said. Clinton said she pressed Pakistan to fully share intelligence with US forces in Afghanistan to prevent attacks and choke off money and supply routes. Better coordination might prevent incidents like the September 20 assault on the US embassy in Kabul, which the US blamed on the Haqqani network, she said. “We can go after funding. We can go after couriers,’’ she said she had told Pakistani leaders. Clinton praised recent cooperation against al Qaeda as a model for how to crack down on the Haqqanis as well as the Taliban, based in Pakistan’s southwestern city of Quetta. “Because of intelligence sharing and mutual cooperation, we have targeted three of the top al Qaeda operatives since bin Laden’s death. That could not have happened without Pakistani cooperation,” she said. Clinton said the US message to Pakistan was that the same insurgents who had launched lethal attacks against US and Afghan targets might unleash their violence inside Pakistan.
US-LED FORCE: Clinton said she urged Pakistan’s leaders to take advantage of the roughly 130,000-troop, US-led NATO force next door in Afghanistan while it was still there. The US and NATO have begun pulling out troops and plan to hand full security control to Afghanistan’s government by the end of 2014. In the coming months, forces from Pakistan and the coalition in Afghanistan should “squeeze” the Taliban and allied extremists, such as the Haqqani network, which operate on both sides of the border, she added.
“There’s no way that any government in Islamabad can control these groups,” Clinton said in the interview, conducted in Tajikistan as she wrapped up a seven-nation trip across the Mideast and south-central Asia.
There was an “opportunity, while we are still with 48 nations across the border in Afghanistan, where we have a lot of assets that we can put at their disposal” to help Pakistan.
The Pakistanis said they “have to figure out a way to do it that doesn’t cause chaos” in their country, she recounted. She said the US and Pakistan agreed on “90 to 95 percent of what needs to be done” and the two countries would work on what “next steps we take together”.
Asked if US troops in Afghanistan would launch cross-border attacks if Pakistan failed to act, Clinton replied: “There’s a lot going on that is aimed at these safe havens, and we will continue to work with them on that.”
Clinton also defended US efforts to encourage the Afghans and Pakistanis to seek negotiations to disarm militants. Reconciliation efforts have gone nowhere since Clinton announced the Obama administration’s support for talks early last year. A Taliban agent posing as a peace envoy assassinated Afghanistan’s chief peace negotiator, Burhanuddin Rabbani, on September 13.
Clinton said negotiations were “a bumpy process” requiring “patience and persistence that we’re willing to invest, in order to determine what’s real and what’s not”.