ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's civilian government should "bite the bullet" and re-open supply routes to NATO forces in Afghanistan in order to ease tensions with the United States, a senior US government official said yesterday.
The United States said on Monday it was withdrawing its team of negotiators from Pakistan without securing a long-sought deal on supply routes for the war in neighbouring Afghanistan, publicly exposing a diplomatic stalemate and deeply strained relations that appear at risk of deteriorating further.
"If the civilian government in Islamabad would bite the bullet and make the political decision to open the ground lines of communication, that would deflect some of the negativity right now," the official told Reuters.
"It wouldn't automatically turn things around, but that would be an important step."
Pakistan banned trucks from carrying supplies to the war effort in Afghanistan last year in protest against a cross-border NATO air attack that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, a measure US officials initially hoped would be short term.
Although the US official suggested Pakistan would have to take several steps to repair heavily damaged ties, he said the strategic allies could not afford a rupture.
"We have longer-term interests that we must keep in mind. The interests are nuclear, it is counterterrorism and it is also reconciliation in Afghanistan for a relatively peaceful and stable region," said the US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Pakistan, for its part, is demanding an apology from the United States over the NATO strike, but it is unlikely to get one.
The NATO strike fanned national anger over everything from covert CIA drone strikes to the US incursion into Pakistan last year to kill al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and the supply routes evolved into a lightning-rod issue.
Relations with Pakistan had been poor for the past six months, said the US official.
He said both the Raymond Davis case — in which a CIA contractor shot and killed two Pakistanis he suspected of trying to rob him — and the raid on bin Laden's compound had strained ties, but the final straw was the deaths of the 24 Pakistani soldiers.
"Salala broke the camel's back," said the US official, referring to the location where the NATO strike occurred.
After six weeks of negotiations that at least once appeared close to a deal, the Pentagon acknowledged on Monday that the US team had failed to clinch an accord and was coming home.
With the Pakistan routes unavailable, NATO has turned to countries to the north of Afghanistan for more expensive, longer land routes.
Separately, Pakistan's ex-ambassador to Washington was summoned yesterday by the country's top court after judges held him responsible for seeking US help to curb the power of the military after Osama bin Laden's death.
The Supreme Court in December ordered a judicial commission to investigate an unsigned document received on May 10, 2011 by the then US top military officer, Admiral Mike Mullen, just days after bin Laden was killed in Pakistan.
Husain Haqqani, who was forced to resign as ambassador last November, denies any wrongdoing and has since returned to his former life as an academic at Boston University, Massachusetts.
The commission submitted a 600-page report yesterday to the Supreme Court in which it held Haqqani responsible for writing the memo, a court official said.
The court adjourned for two weeks and ordered Haqqani, along with witness, American businessman Mansoor Ijaz, and one of the petitioners, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, to appear when the hearing resumes, the official told
AFP.
Haqqani said the report was "political and one-sided", based on "dubious" claims from "a foreigner" and accused the commission of ignoring his requests.
"In any case, the commission was created as a fact-finding body and not as a trial court so it has no right to pronounce anyone guilty or innocent of any crime," he said in a statement.
The memo was allegedly an attempt to enlist US help to head off a feared military coup in exchange for overhauling Pakistan's powerful security leadership.
