U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a lengthy discussion with Pakistan officials on the matter of how to deal with the insurgent Haqqani network after last week’s deadly, 20-hour-long attack on NATO buildings and the American embassy in Kabul.
Two State Department officials, who spoke to reporters on Sunday on condition of anonymity, said that Clinton told Pakistan’s minister of foreign affairs, Hina Rabbani Khar, that the Haqqani network must be dealt with. Clinton and Khar’s talks were held behind closed doors.
The Haqqani network, based in Pakistan’s North Waziristan near the border areas, is a major Taliban-allied insurgent faction that is battling with U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
The State Department officials said that Khar agreed with Clinton that the network poses a danger to NATO troops and Pakistani civilians alike, and would dedicate resources to deal with it.
Some 19,000 Pakistanis have been killed in terrorist attacks since 2003, Khar had said.
In the Kabul attack, five Afghan police officers and 11 civilians were killed. Six militants held a partially-constructed building for hours and laid siege on the NATO and embassy building before all of them were killed.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, said the network was behind the attack on the buildings.
During the meeting, the official said that the issue of the Haqqani network was “the first thing on the Secretary’s agenda and also the last,” adding that the Kabul attacks changed the nature of the meeting, which was held a day before the United Nations General Assembly began on Monday.
“That part of the conversation concluded that joint efforts need to be made to end this threat from the Haqqanis, and that Pakistan and the United States ought to be working together on this and not separately,” a spokesperson said, adding that “both ministers committed themselves to working on this as a matter of priority.”
The meeting was held at a time when relations between the United States and Pakistan have improved in recent weeks, with both sides putting behind them the bitterness caused by the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.
However, some of that negative sentiment was revived when Cameron Munter, the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, told Radio Pakistan there is evidence linking the Haqqani network to the Pakistani military.
The State Department officials, without going into specifics, implied that the two diplomats spoke about the links between the Pakistani government and the Haqqani.
“The theme there was that really there can’t be a secure and stable and prosperous Afghanistan outside of a secure, stable, and prosperous region,” one of the officials said.
The Haqqani network, which is thought to have began operating in the mid-1990s, may have been the group responsible for introducing suicide bombing to militants in Afghanistan. It is also thought to be a major supplier for bomb parts in the region.
The group is said to be headed by Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani, who is believed to be in his 60s, and is a former anti-Soviet resistance commander.
U.S. and Afghan intelligence officials believe that the network, with the aid of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, was behind attacks on the 2008 attack Indian Embassy as well as an assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai, also in 2008.
