LAHORE: US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Thursday that Pakistan had little choice but to take a more aggressive approach to combating the Taliban and other insurgents that threaten to destabilise the country.
With the country reeling from Wednesday’s devastating bombing in Peshawar, Clinton engaged in an intense give-and-take with students at the Government College of Lahore, insisting that inaction by the government would have ceded ground to terrorists.
“If you want to see your territory shrink, that’s your choice,” she said, adding that she believed it would be a bad choice.Dozens of students rushed to line up for the microphone when the session began. Their questions were not hostile, but showed a strong sense of doubt that the US can be a reliable and trusted partner for Pakistan.
Clinton met with the students on the second day of a three-day visit to Pakistan, her first as secretary of state. Clinton likened Pakistan’s situation with Taliban forces to a theoretical advance of terrorists into the United States from across the Canadian border.
It would be unthinkable, she said, for the US government to decide “let them have Washington (state)” first, then Montana, then the sparsely populated Dakotas, because those states are far from the major centres of population and power on the East Coast.
Clinton was responding to a student who suggested that Washington was forcing Pakistan to use military force on its own territory. It was one of several questions from the students that raised doubts about the relationship between the United States and Pakistan.
During her hour-long appearance at the college, Clinton stressed that a key purpose of her three-day visit to Pakistan, which began on Wednesday, was to reach out to ordinary Pakistanis and urge a better effort to bridge differences and improve mutual understanding.
“We are now at a point where we can chart a different course,” she said, referring to past differences over an absence of democracy in Pakistan and Pakistani association with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
As a way of repudiating past US policies toward Pakistan, Clinton told the students “there is a huge difference’’ between the Obama administration’s approach and that of former president George W Bush.
“I spent my entire eight years in the Senate opposing him,’’ she said to a burst of applause from the audience of several hundred students. “So, to me, it’s like daylight and dark.’’Although Clinton said she was making a priority of engaging frankly and openly on her visit, she declined to talk about a subject that has stirred some of the strongest feelings of anti-Americanism here — US drone aircraft attacks against extremist targets on the Pakistan side of the Afghan border. “There is a war going on,’’ she said, adding the US wants to help Pakistan be successful.
Clinton repeated her conviction that the two countries’ common interests far outweighed their differences. “I am well aware that there is a trust deficit,” Clinton said. “My message is that’s not the way it should be. We cannot let a minority of people in both countries determine our relationship.”
Clinton urged Pakistan’s youth to stand firm against the forces of religious extremism, saying it threatened everything that both Americans and Pakistanis hold dear. She said, “Though the terror war is being fought on your (Pakistan) land, but it is not Pakistan’s war alone; Pakistan is fighting on the front and the US stands by it.” She observed if peace was restored between Pakistan and India and their mutual disputes were resolved, Pakistan would take off as a rocket in terms of economic development
Before leaving for Lahore, Clinton covered her head and chest with a royal blue scarf to visit the shrine of a Sufi saint in Islamabad. Accompanied by Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Clinton closed her eyes and pressed her fingers together in prayer, then gave alms to the needy at the Bari Imam mausoleum.
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