US Secretary of State John Kerry has said the US-Pakistan relationship should not be seen in a narrow perspective of a few contentious issues, as he underlined the importance of the country’s counterterrorism cooperation during a hearing on the Capitol Hill.
“In Pakistan, for instance, as everybody knows, certain things that have been taking place over the years have really created anger within the country. And the body politic is tense, and the politicians respond to that. But then they’ve been trying to be helpful in other ways, and they have been,” Kerry told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The chief American diplomat also noted the crucial significance of Pakistani intelligence cooperation and the country’s overland routes that transport supplies into and equipment out of landlocked Afghanistan.
“And we have a route for transiting our aid to – our aid – all of our supplies to our troops in Afghanistan for the last years, and now bringing things out. We’ve had cooperation on intel(ligence). We’ve had cooperation on nuclear weapons. We have cooperation on efforts to ferret out, you know, bad actors in FATA, in the western part of the country.”
“I think they’ve got 150,000 troops out there fighting the same fight we are now,” he emphasised in reference to Pakistan’s deployment of troops along the Afghan border.
“So it’s a mixed bag is the bottom line. And it doesn’t lend itself to sort of just come in and say, well, Dr Afridi’s in jail, he shouldn’t be, et cetera. We have said that. We will fight that. And it’s wrong, and it angers all of us. But I don’t think you can chuck the whole relationship over one or two or three things here and there because of the overall interest that we have,” Kerry told a lawmaker, who raised the issue of Dr Shakil Afridi’s imprisonment.
Good advice.
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Looser …
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