NATO presses Pakistan on 'terrorist' safe havens

NATO chief Rasmussen calls for 'positive engagement' from Islamabad to ensure stability in Afghanistan.


Afp September 30, 2011

BRUSSELS: NATO's chief piled pressure on Pakistan on Friday to step up the fight against "terrorists" enjoying safe havens in the border region with Afghanistan.

Amid growing US pressure for Pakistan to take action against al Qaeda-linked extremists, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen called for a "positive engagement" from Islamabad to ensure stability in Afghanistan.

"We encourage the Pakistani military and the Pakistani government to do its utmost to fight extremism and terrorism in the border region," Rasmussen said at a defence forum hosted by the European Policy Centre think tank.

(Read: The Taliban & the Haqqanis)

"It is really a security problem for our troops in Afghanistan that terrorists have safe havens, and that's a fact, in Pakistan," he said. "We have to deal with that and it's in our mutual interest to deal with that."

"That's a reason why we have conveyed that clear message to Pakistan authorities."

The government and political leaders on Thursday closed ranks against increasing US pressure for action against the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, refusing to be pressured into doing more in the war on terror.

In an unprecedented condemnation of Pakistan, the outgoing head of the US military, Admiral Mike Mullen, last week accused the country of "exporting" violent extremism to Afghanistan through proxies.

Mullen also charged that the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) was actively supporting the Haqqani network blamed for an assault on the US embassy in Kabul this month.

There are 140,000 NATO-led foreign forces in Afghanistan, some 100,000 of them from the United States, fighting a Taliban-led insurgency.

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COMMENTS (36)

Ammar Khalid | 12 years ago | Reply

Okay lets make sense of the news. Here Rasmussen (Nato's secretary General) is asking Pakistan to act on "terrorist" safe havens i.e. to kill Haqqani fighters. Now some poeple are in the illusion that this is a war between sanity and insanity and not war on Islam. Let me remind these people that this very Rasmussen criticized the newspaper Politiken Tøger Seidenfaden which reprinted the Prophet Mohammed caricatures in 2008 and then the newspaper apologized later on. But guess what???!?!!!!! Rasmussen criticized the newspaper on apologizing and not for the reprinting the caricatures!!!!!!!!!! Now he is calling us to fight on his behalf??

G. Din | 12 years ago | Reply

@Thomas (Australian): It is normally observed that those who suffer from Stockholm Syndrome are generally completely unaware of it.

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