Stop terror aid or face action: US to Pak-ToI-22.9.11

Warning To Islamabad: Can’t Let Haqqanis Attack Our Forces And Return To Safe Havens
Chidanand Rajghatta TNN

Washington:A three and half hour tutorial for Pakistan’s foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar. Four hours of talks with the military-dominated country’s obdurate army chief Pervez Ashfaq Kayani. An under the radar visit to Washington by Pakistan spy chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha for more discussions.
The Obama administration is going full court press on Pakistan, warning the chaotic country that it must give up its policy of using terrorism, or face US wrath. “If you are against terrorism, you have to be against all forms of terrorism,” defence secretary Leon Panetta said at the Pentagon on Tuesday in some of the bluntest language used against Pakistan.
“You cannot have the Haqqanis coming across the border attacking our forces and (Afghans) and disappearing back into a safe haven. That is not tolerable, and we have urged them to take steps.”
Separately, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that “In what amounts to an ultimatum, administration officials have indicated that the US will act unilaterally if Pakistan does not comply.” Washington pundits mused at length about how the Obama Administration has moved much of its supply routes to Afghanistan to the Northern Distribution Network, reducing its dependence on Pakistan so that it can have greater leverage on the country increasingly seen as having gone rogue.
Panetta, referring to last week’s attacks in Afghanistan on US assets in Afghanistan attributed to the ISI-backed Haqqani group, was more circumspect in public, saying “I’m not going to talk about how we’re going to respond,” but adding, “We’re not going to allow these types of attacks to go on.” The bluntest comment on the incident came from the US ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Hunter, who said, “There is evidence linking the Haqqani network to the Pakistan government.”
If true, the US would have little reason not to declare Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism, but for now the Obama administration is making one last effort to walk Pakistan back from its dangerous strategy.
The exercise began with a lesson in regional history by secretary of state Hillary Clinton to Khar, 34, who would have been in high school when the former visited Pakistan as First Lady. The duration of the talks — three and a half hours — was seen as an effort by Clinton to engage Pakistan’s future leadership, although currently, she, like most of the country’s civilian leadership, is regarded as a mouthpiece for the military.
US officials later disclosed that the issue of counter-terrorism was “both the first issue and the last issue on their agenda”, even as Khar insisted in New York that they had discussed a broad swath of topics, and made light of the US warning.
Meanwhile, a more weighty meeting was taking place in Seville, Spain, on the sidelines of a Nato meeting where the top US military official, Admiral Mike Mullen, engaged Pakistan’s army chief Kayani, who he describes as his personal friend, in four hours of talks aimed at salvaging ties. But Mullen’s remarks at a think-tank meeting in Washington suggested he had made little headway.
“The ISI has to make this decision to strategically disengage. They have been supporting proxies for an extended period of time,” Mullen said at a Carnegie Endowment talks in language that is increasingly starting to resemble New Delhi’s.