The warning came as a top US military commander was in Pakistan for talks with the army chief at a time of intense strain between the two countries. The US Embassy said Gen. James Mattis, head of US Central Command, arrived in Pakistan late Friday, and that he will meet the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. Ties between Islamabad and Washington are in crisis after American officials stepped up accusations that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence was aiding insurgents in neighboring Afghanistan, including those who took part in an attack on the US Embassy last week in Kabul.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said Saturday that there are red lines and rules of engagement with America, which should not be broken.
“It opens all kinds of doors and all kinds of options,” she told Pakistan’s private Aaj News TV from New York. The comment was in response to a question about the possibility of US troops coming to Pakistan. Khar, however, insisted that Pakistan’s policy was to seek a more intensive engagement with the US and that she would like to discourage any blame game.
“If many of your goals are not achieved, you do not make someone a scapegoat,” she said, addressing the US allegations.
The US allegations have seen a strong reaction from Pakistan.
Gen. Kayani said on Friday that the charges were baseless and part of a public “blame game” detrimental to peace in Afghanistan. Other Islamabad officials urged Washington to present evidence for such a serious allegation. Khar warned the United States is risking losing an ally in the war on terror.
The row began when Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday accused the ISI of supporting Haqqani insurgents in planning and executing last week’s 22-hour assault on the US Embassy and a truck bombing that wounded 77 American soldiers days earlier.
Kayani said the allegations were “very unfortunate and not based on facts.”
The claims were the most serious yet by an American official against nuclear-armed Pakistan, which Washington has given billions in civilian and military aid over the last 10 years to try to secure its cooperation inside Afghanistan and against Al-Qaeda.
The Haqqani network is widely believed to be based in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area along the Afghan border. The group has historical ties to Pakistani intelligence, dating back to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The relationship between the two countries has never been smooth, but it took one of its hardest hits when US commandos slipped into Pakistan on May 2 without informing the Pakistanis of their mission and killed Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden in a town not far from Islamabad.
