US-Pak relation at new low
Pakistan yesterday warned the United States that it could lose an ally if it continues to publicly accuse Islamabad of exporting violence to Afghanistan and being involved in attacks on US targets.
In the most stinging American indictment yet of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), top US military officer Admiral Mike Mullen accused the spy agency of involvement in two recent attacks on US interests in Afghanistan.
Pakistan flatly denies sponsoring violence in Afghanistan, but its military believed to have historical ties to the Taliban and other Islamist militants.
"We have also conveyed this to the United States, that you will lose an ally. You cannot afford to alienate Pakistan. You cannot afford to alienate the Pakistani people," Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar told private Geo TV.
"If you are choosing to do so, and if they are choosing to do so, it will be at their own cost," she said, condemning the allegations as humiliating.
"Anything which is said about an ally, about a partner publicly to recriminate it, to humiliate it, is not acceptable," she told the Pakistani station in New York, where has been attending the UN General Assembly.
Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday accused Pakistan of "exporting" violent extremism to Afghanistan through proxies and warned of possible action to protect American troops, without providing any details of either.
Calling the Haqqani network a "veritable arm" of the ISI, Mullen accused the intelligence agency of backing this month's truck bombing on a Nato base that wounded 77 Americans; a 19-hour siege on the US embassy in Kabul; and a June attack on the InterContinental hotel in Kabul all blamed on the Haqqanis.
Fears are now growing in Pakistan that an avalanche of American demands for action on the Haqqani network is more than just wanting a scapegoat for American setbacks in the long Afghan war.
Yet it remains unclear what action America could take against Pakistan or the Haqqanis, other than the CIA drone war that already targets Haqqani fighters.
Back in Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani yesterday adopted a more circumspect response to the furore created by Mullen's remarks.
"I will tell them (Americans) -- if they can't live without us then they should increase contacts with us to remove misunderstandings," he said.
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