PARIS - US General David Petraeus admitted Wednesday there was no
option but to work on troubled relations with Pakistan, days after
standing down from his job at the helm of coalition forces in
Afghanistan.
Speaking in Paris on his way to his new job as CIA
chief, the most celebrated military leader of his generation said
Afghanistan's neighbour wanted to eliminate Al-Qaeda and Taliban
militants but was struggling.
"They'll be the first to say that
there are limits to how much they can do," said the man who headed the
United States' longest-running war for the last year, with less
territory controlled by militants today but civilian deaths up.
"They have a lot of short sticks in hornets nests right now and they have to consolidate some of those gains."
Petraeus
said Pakistani anti-militant operations have been impressive but they
"clearly need further effort to deal with some of the other elements,
like the Qaeda network in North Waziristan and the Taliban in
Baluchistan".
"This relationship is in a difficult stage,"
Petraeus said, blaming WikiLeaks revelations, the arrest of CIA agent
Raymond Davis as well as the killing by US forces of Al-Qaeda kingpin
Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan in May.
He said it was believable
that Pakistani intelligence did not know that Bin Laden was hiding out
in Abbottobad, home to much of the Pakistani military establishment,
when he was killed there.
"It is credible to me that they did not
know. We received no intelligence whatsoever to indicate that there was
any awareness that he was there."
But while "we see the Bin Laden
raid as an extraordinary success, intelligence together with military
forces, Pakistan sees it as an affront to their national sovereignty,
we've got to work our way through this".
"We know what happens
when we walk away from Pakistan and Afghanistan, we've literally seen
the movie before, it's called 'Charlie Wilson's War' (about covert US
support for anti-Soviet Afghan fighters) and indeed that is not in my
view a good option.
"However difficult the relationship may be
it's one we need to continue to work, it's one where we need to
recognise what our Pakistani partners have done, they've sacrificed
several thousand soldiers and police and their civilians have suffered
substantial levels of violence."
Petraeus oversaw a surge of tens
of thousands of troops into Afghanistan in a last-ditch bid to reverse
a nearly 10-year Taliban insurgency and repeat the success of a similar
surge he masterminded in Iraq.
But with Taliban leaders not
currently wanting to join the political process in Afghanistan,
Petraeus said US and Afghan authorities should work on what he said was
militants' creeping dissatisfaction with their commanders. AFP
