Pakistan will soon reopen the ground lines of communication to Afghanistan, which were shut down last November following the death of 24 soldiers in a NATO cross border fire, the White House has said. “We continue to work with Pakistan on this issue. We did not anticipate that the supply line issue was going to be resolved prior to the summit. And our teams continue to meet and we are making diligent progress,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Tuesday. He said the US expected this issue to be resolved. “We have said that the government of Pakistan has said that and we expect it to happen,” Carney said when asked if non-opening of the supply routes during the just concluded NATO Summit in Chicago was a failure of US President Barack Obama. “The fact is Pakistan says it wants to resolve this… we obviously are interested in resolving it. It will be resolved, we are confident. We didn’t anticipate it would be resolved prior to the summit. We are continuing to work towards its resolution,” Carney said, adding there was no question of President Obama being disappointed on this. “He (Obama) met briefly with President Zardari. There was no expectation for it to be resolved during the summit. This is being worked on diligently by representatives of both governments and we expect them to be resolved,” Carney said. In a briefing, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said negotiating teams of the US and Pakistan on the land routes did meet again on Tuesday and were continuing to work through the issues. To another question about tackling down the terrorism, Nuland said during the secretary of states’ meeting with President Asif Zardari there was an extensive discussion about the importance of US-Pakistan working together on all of these counterterrorism issues, including the Haqqani Network issues. She said the commitment remained the same and they needed to really get the work done now.
