US and Pakistani military leaders discussed how to better coordinate combat operations along the Afghan border, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.
At the start of three days of US-Pakistan ‘strategic dialogue,’ Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani agreed in a 30-minute meeting on the need to improve cooperation on the Afghan-Pakistani border, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.
“We’re both very active along the border and they talked at some length about how we can better coordinate our operations on our respective sides of the border,” Morrell told reporters. Cooperation between military commanders already had improved on the border “but this incident clearly indicates that there’s more work to be done,” said Morrell, referring to the helicopter raid that left two Pakistani soldiers dead.
Gates also repeated Washington’s regret over the incident, and “expressed his condolences to the families” of the Pakistan soldiers who died, he said. The US defence secretary stressed that the shooting of the border guards was “unintentional” and that the US military was working with Pakistan to make sure it never happens again, he said.
Top US military officer Admiral Mike Mullen also attended the meeting along with the third ranking official at the Pentagon, Michele Flournoy, the US undersecretary of defence for policy.
Gates expressed “appreciation” for Pakistan’s military campaign against extremists on its soil and underlined Washington’s desire to build a long-term partnership that did not focus solely on security issues, Morrell said.
The Pentagon chief told Pakistan that the US wants “to elevate this relationship from the day-to-day ups and downs that it has historically experienced,” he said.
US deputy special representative on Pakistan and Afghanistan Frank Ruggiero said the talks were aimed to “move beyond these tensions”, adding that the US will take up support for Pakistan’s economy, flood survivors and military.
“We specifically worked with the Pakistanis over the summer to identify what would be the types of military equipment and so on,” Ruggiero told reporters. “That will be a topic of discussion at the strategic dialogue.” The US Congress last year approved a five-year, $7.5 billion package for Pakistan aimed at building schools, infrastructure and democratic institutions in the hopes of denting the appeal of extremists.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 21st, 2010.
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