Nothing new to see here: US brushes aside leaked NATO report

US State Department spokesperson says they have talked to Pakistan over the report.

WASHINGTON: US State Department in a press conference said that a classified NATO report, leaked earlier on Wednesday, was not supposed to have made it to public light, and that many of the concerns which the US had, had already been brought to the notice of Pakistani authorities.

US State Department spokesperson, Victoria Nuland, at the daily press briefing, told reporters that a leaked NATO report was a summary of what Taliban members in detention had said.

She added that NATO and the Pakistani Foreign Minister had already talked about the report, and that this was a classified report that was not meant to come out.

In response to a question, Nuland said that Secretary Clinton had raised the issues with the Pakistani government during her last visit to the country, in late October, 2011. The State Department spokesperson said that the US had been talking to Pakistan about the issues of safe havens and co-operation in acting against terrorists.

"The secretary raised many of these issues when she was in Pakistan last fall. So from that perspective, obviously this is not new -- our concerns about safe havens, our concerns about whether together we are doing enough to go after these groups, our interest in cooperating with the Pakistanis to do more. So that's the conversation that we've been having with some time -- for some time, and the exact sort of kind of cooperation we want to get back to as soon as we can," she said.

In response to a question, Nuland added that she liked the turn of phrase used by FM Khar who had referred to the BBC report as ‘old wine in an even older bottle.’