Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, March 29th, 2024

Clinton Asks Pakistan to Move Against Haqqanis

Clinton Asks Pakistan  to Move Against Haqqanis

WASHINGTON - Washington has asked Islamabad to take immediate, strong and effective action against the Haqqani Network, blamed for last week's attack on the US embassy in Kabul, US officials said.
"The issue of counterterrorism and particularly the issue of the Haqqani Network was the first thing on Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's agenda and also the last," a senior State Department official told reporters after the meeting between Clinton and Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar in New York on Sunday.
The meeting lasted for a marathon three and half hours."That part of the conversation concluded that joint efforts need to be made to end this threat from the Haqqanis, and that Pakistan and the United States ought to be working together on this and not separately," the official said.

He added: "There are three things. One is that there are clearly actions that the Pakistanis could take to go after the Haqqani Network, and I thought the minister was quite clear in saying that those were the kinds of things that the Pakistani government would look at and would take action on."

Secondly, the official said, there were things that could possibly be done jointly. The two leaders also discussed for considerable time the current situation in Afghanistan and the peace process. "There was a considerable discussion, as you can imagine, about Afghan-led and Afghan-owned reconciliation.

"Foreign Secretary (Salman) Bashir took the opportunity to brief us on the meeting, I guess yesterday or the day before yesterday, of the joint commission between Pakistan and Afghanistan," the official said.
"We also talked a lot about the regional aspects of bringing peace to Afghanistan and we reviewed the upcoming meetings in Istanbul on November 2 and in Bonn on December 5 and the role that the United States was trying to play to support Turkey and Afghanistan in the first instance and then Germany and Afghanistan in the second," he said.