Pakistanis laud Clinton’s candor

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan | Pakistani political analysts as well as students praised Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for speaking the “truth” during her visit last week, but also warned that Washington will have to match her words with action in order to crush al Qaeda- and Taliban-led terrorism.

A day after Mrs. Clinton ended her three-day visit, during which she suggested that the Pakistani government was not doing enough to capture al Qaeda leaders, Pakistan’s prime minister said the country does not have “any other option” but to defeat the militants.

“We are at war,” Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told reporters in Peshawar, where a car bombing killed more than 115 people on Wednesday as Mrs. Clinton arrived in Pakistan.

“Our civil leadership, our military leadership and political leadership … we are on the same page that we have to fight the militancy. We do not have any other option, because their intentions are to take over” the country, the Associated Press quoted Mr. Gilani as saying.

The Pakistani army and air force have been targeting militants’ strongholds in the South Waziristan region close to the Afghan border in a massive offensive that began more than two weeks ago.

On Saturday, Pakistani jets bombed three hide-outs of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud in the Orkazai tribal region, killing at least eight militants and wounding several others. Another air strike killed seven militants in the Kurram tribal region, intelligence officials said, according to the AP.

Also Saturday, seven paramilitary soldiers driving through the Khyber tribal area were killed by a roadside bomb planted by suspected Taliban militants, local official Ghulam Farooq Khan told the AP.

During her visit, Mrs. Clinton met with Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Mr. Gilani, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and several other political and military officials. The part of the visit that drew the most attention, however, was her direct interaction with the people of Pakistan in the political capital, Islamabad, and the cultural capital, Lahore, in the form of town-hall meetings and group interviews by journalists.

In all the events, she emphasized that defeating Islamist militants active along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border was vital for the security of the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Speaking to a group of journalists in Lahore on Thursday, Mrs. Clinton criticized the Pakistani government for not doing enough to hunt down al Qaeda leaders and suggested that some Pakistani officials know where the terrorist leaders are hiding.

“I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” she said. “Maybe that’s the case. Maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.”

Her visit came two weeks after President Obama approved $7.5 billion in nonmilitary aid to Pakistan. While welcoming the assistance, Pakistani officials expressed concern that it comes with unfair conditions on Pakistan’s military.

At a town-hall meeting in Lahore, Mrs. Clinton faced a group of students who asked pointed questions about the aid terms and about U.S. drone attacks targeting militants close to the Afghan border - with one student calling them “executions without trial.”

“The [aid] bill does not impinge on Pakistani sovereignty. It does not compromise Pakistan’s national-security interests. It does not micromanage any aspect of Pakistan’s military or civilian operations,” Mrs. Clinton said, but she added that the U.S. administration “did not do a very good job communicating what our intentions were.”

She also addressed the common Pakistani complaint that Washington has a history of abandoning Pakistan after achieving short-term strategic goals in the region, such as driving the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan with the help of Pakistan in 1989.

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