Pakistan's army chief paid a visit to the country's president
Saturday in a meeting that may signal a willingness for reconciliation
between the military and the civilian government after a week of
escalating tensions and rumors of an impending coup.
Army chief
Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani and President Asif Ali Zardari discussed the
"current security situation," according to the state-run news agency.
Friction
between the military and the government has spiked after an unsigned
memo was sent to Washington last year asking for its help in heading off
a supposed coup. The note enraged the army, which was still smarting
from the humiliation of last year's covert U.S. raid that killed Osama
bin Laden north of Islamabad.
Zardari's office welcomed the meeting with Kayani and said it should help relations.
The
president's Pakistan People's Party's Information Secretary Qamar Zaman
Kaira said the meeting was not routine, "given Pakistan's situation,
the heat that is being felt."
He told Pakistani television that "certainly this meeting will make things better. ... It will improve the tense situation."
The
army has staged at least three coups in Pakistan's six-decade history
and still considers itself the true custodian of the country's
interests. On Wednesday, it warned of "grievous consequences" for the
country in an unusual statement, raising fear it might try again to oust
the government.
Analysts say Gen. Kayani has little appetite for a
coup, but they say the generals may be happy to allow the Supreme Court
to dismiss the government by "constitutional means." The court has
legitimized earlier coups.
The nuclear-armed country is facing a
host of problems, among them near economic collapse, a virulent
al-Qaida- and Taliban-led insurgency, and a crisis in its relations with
its key ally, the United States, following NATO airstrikes in November
that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border.
That
attack has prompted Islamabad to review its coordination with U.S. and
NATO forces, and on Saturday Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani vowed to
protect Pakistani sovereignty in new rules being drawn up to regulate
such coordination.
"Pakistan's sovereignty and territorial
integrity are not negotiable," Gilani said at the opening of a special
committee to discuss the fallout over the airstrikes. "We would reject
any approach that would tend to compromise our sovereignty, honor and
national dignity."
Islamabad shut NATO and U.S. supply routes running into Afghanistan through Pakistan in response to the airstrikes.
Parliamentarians
have recommended that Islamabad seek "guarantees" that Washington will
respect the country's sovereignty and avoid any future violations of the
country's borders, said Khursheed Ahmed, a member of parliament's
national security committee. He declined to elaborate.
A U.S.
investigation into the incident found that Pakistani forces fired first
and that American troops acted in self-defense. But U.S. efforts to
determine whether there were Pakistani forces in the area were foiled by
bad maps, poor coordination and Islamabad's failure to provide the
locations of its border posts, according to the report..
Pakistani
army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas has rejected the U.S. findings and
insisted that Pakistani forces retaliated only after coalition
helicopters "started engagement." He also denied that Pakistan failed to
notify NATO of the location of the two border posts that were attacked.
Gilani said the committee planned to consider the U.S. report on the border incident, without elaborating.
The
prime minister has called for a "show of confidence" vote in parliament
Monday to support of the government. In the latest violence in the
northwest, gunmen and suicide bombers attacked a police station,
sparking a firefight that killed one officer and three civilians, said
Bahawal Khan, a local police official. The militants struck about midday
Saturday in Dera Ismail Khan district and fighting continued for hours
afterward.
About eight or 10 attackers wearing police uniforms
besieged the station, and three suicide bombers detonated their
explosives during the battle, police said. Another attacker was killed
in the fighting.
The district sits at the edge of South Waziristan
tribal region that served as Pakistani Taliban headquarters before the
Pakistani army launched an offensive in late 2009. AP
