United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that Washington's leverage with Pakistan to go after the Haqqani network, which has been killing US soldiers and is responsible for the attack on the US embassy in Kabul, was limited.
When the US Congress asked her where exactly the US and Pakistan were with regard to the charges made by recently retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen -- that the Haqqani network is the 'veritable arm of the ISI' -- Clinton, said, "Everyone agrees that the Haqqani network has safe havens inside Pakistan, that those safe havens given them a place to plan and direct operations that kill Afghans and Americans."
But latching on to the more expansive comments of Mullen when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September just before his retirement, Clinton said, "There is no solution in the region without Pakistan and no stable future in the region without a partnership."
Clinton, who was appearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to brief them about her meetings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, argued, "If you look at everything that Admiral Mullen said in his testimony, he raised serious questions which our government has repeatedly raised publicly and privately about the safe havens, but he also said that the bilateral relationship was critical and consequential and that we do have a lot of shared interests, particularly in the fight against terrorism."
"So it's important to recognise that we are all balancing these two realities," she said, adding, "It would be great if we could get rid of one -- namely, the safe havens or the difficulties that the Pakistanis themselves feel they have in taking the fight to the terrorists, because they believe that they have already paid a grievous price and worry about how they can sustain that."
But Clinton said, "You know, we operate on both these channels at one time."
Earlier, in her opening remarks, Clinton said that while in Islamabad last week, Mullen's successor General Demsey, Central Intelligence Agency Director David Patraeus and she had "delivered a single, unified message."
"We urged Pakistan's civilian and military leadership to join us in squeezing the Haqqani network from both sides of the border and in closing the safe havens," she said.
Clinton said that she had also made clear to the Pakistani leadership that "trying to distinguish between so-called good terrorists and bad terrorists is ultimately self-defeating and dangerous. No one who targets innocent civilians of any nationality should be tolerated or protected."
"Now, we are not suggesting that Pakistan sacrifice its own security; quite the opposite. We respect the sacrifices that Pakistan has already made. And it's important for Americans to be reminded, over the past decade, more than 5,000 Pakistani soldiers have been lost, and tens of thousands Pakistani citizens have been killed or injured. That's why we are pursuing a vision of shared security that benefits us all," she said.
At the outset, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican and chairman of the Committee, said, "We see brazen attacks by Islamabad's armed proxies against the US embassy and other US targets in Afghanistan".
She argued that there's no denying that US and Pakistan "are at a crossroads," and that "we cannot sustain a partnership with Islamabad if it pursues policies that are hostile to US interests and jeopardises American lives."
She said that as a result, it was "hard to be optimistic" on whether the relationship "can be salvaged and our strategic objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan be brought into better alignment."
Ros-Lehtinen said, all of the options on the table seemingly "appear deeply unappetising -- all run the risk of being ineffectual, counterproductive, or both."
She also took a hefty swipe at the Obama administration for negotiating with the Haqqani network even as it claimed that US troops were trying to eliminate this network.
"On the one hand, the US is negotiating with the Haqqani network, and yet, on the other, we are attempting to destroy the Haqqani network," she said.
