‘Karzai not cutting deal with Pakistan’

Richard Holbrooke brushed aside concerns that Afghan President is seeking to cut a separate deal with Islamabad.

WASHINGTON: Richard Holbrooke, US President Barack Obama’s pointman for Pakistan and Afghanistan, has brushed aside concerns that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is seeking to cut a separate deal with Islamabad in anticipation of a US withdrawal.

In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, the special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan also said that a meeting in late May between Karzai and Pakistan’s Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani was “a good thing, not a bad thing.”

“Now, in the Kayani-Karzai meeting, the American commanding general of Isaf, Nato was there, then General McChrystal. I’m sure General Petraeus (the current US commander) will continue to play the same role, if not more so. And I have talked to David (Petraeus) about that,” he said. “As long as they had no dialogue, you couldn’t get anywhere.”

He said US policy was aimed at narrowing the historic gap between Islamabad and Kabul by encouraging the two countries to work together while taking India’s strategic interests into account. “And that is moving forward,” he said. “It’s a tough, difficult policy. But it is the only one that meets our regional, international and national security interests.”

Asked about Pakistan’s cooperation and change in attitude vis-a-vis combating the Taliban, Holbrooke said that “you cannot just go after the Pakistanis to do this and do that in the tribal areas.” “You have to have an entire approach to the country. This has been lacking for over a decade,” he pointed out.

President Obama’s emissary was referring to the recent progress in US-Pakistan cooperative relations in wide-ranging areas in contrast with uni-focal security-driven nature of ties the two countries had had in the past.

Continuing, Holbrooke added, the United States is now “approaching the country differently. And we are beginning to see real signs of movement. Nonetheless, we still have problems.”

Published in The Express Tribune, July 26^th, 2010.